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The transformative art of photographer Robert Frank

BRUNSWICK, Maine — American culture in the 1950s did not lack for transformative figures. The work of most of them was about liberation and energy: Pollock and de Kooning, Elvis Presley, the Beat writers, Marlon Brando, Leonard Bernstein.

For a few, it was about liberation and stillness: Mark Rothko, Miles Davis, Robert Frank.

Frank, who turns 92 in November, is the only one on that list still alive. No one else on it has done work that's held up better. Has still photography ever been more "still" than in the 83 images that make up his masterpiece, "The Americans" (1958)? What fills that book are flags flapping, jukeboxes gleaming, highways beckoning, cars ready to rev. But what defines it are so many people lost in thought, looking off into space, standing athwart a rocket-finned America.

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That human stillness is no less evident in "Robert Frank: Sideways." It runs at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art through Jan. 29. As in "The Americans," dreaminess and solidity uniquely combine. Is that why Frank's pictures almost never look quite like anyone else's? The distinctiveness is indefinable. It's not as if there's calling-card visual trickeration or a tell-tale limitation in subject or locale. Even so, the distinctiveness is unmistakable.

It's startling, in fact, when a Frank photograph does look like someone else's. One of the 49 photographs in "Sideways," taken in Tennessee, in 1961, could be slipped into a Farm Security Administration collection and only an expert would be the wiser.

Just over four dozen images isn't very many. But "Sideways" feels much larger, ranging in date from 1948 to 1961, and including work from Peru, Frank's native Switzerland, Spain, Paris, London, Wales, Puerto Rico, and throughout the United States (New York, the Carolinas, Wyoming, California, the Midwest).

One of the last photographs in "Sideways" is a portrait of his friend Jack Kerouac. In Kerouac's introduction to "The Americans," he famously wrote: ''Robert Frank, Swiss, unobtrusive, nice, with that little camera that he raises and snaps with one hand, sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film, taking rank among the tragic poets of the world."

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It wasn't just America where Frank's camera found — or created — poetry. "When people look at my pictures,'' he wrote in 1951, "I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice." "Twice" is the genius word there. It matters even more than "poem" does. To read once would be just lyricism. To read twice is something beyond that. It's the difference between paraphrase and commitment to memory: lyricism tempered, distressed, hardened.

Again and again in "The Americans," the everyday and mythic coincide — or collide. The alienation that detractors found in the book is simply rugged individualism without self-congratulation (or a paycheck). In "Sideways," it's the casual and monumental that frequently coincide.

A miner walks up an unpaved road in Wales. His cap and overcoat frame a face as weathered as the runnels beneath his feet. Look more closely and note how a distant utility pole aligns with the crown of his cap. The pole extends the vertical thrust of the man's body. That verticality in turn plays off of the gentle curve of the road and delicate dotting that a group of figures in the far background provides. The arrangement could hardly be simpler, except that it's just as much a study in stripped-down intricacy.

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Frank took that photograph in 1953. Two years earlier, he was in London. A line of office workers trudges along a sidewalk. It's a safe bet that their overcoats are more expensive than the miner's. No time of day is given, but the slumping of so many shoulders (speaking of casual) would indicate that it's morning and they're on their way to work. There's no sense of hurry to this pedestrian rush hour (speaking of stillness). Behind them looms an indeterminate building of great mass (speaking of monumental).

For all that so many of the foreign pictures are arresting — the chiming of farmer's body and spray of grain, in Peru, in 1948; the hatchety interplay of two Swiss profiles, from 1950 — it's the US pictures that command attention. It's hard to resist the search for echoes of "The Americans." They're certainly here.

Three crosses in South Carolina recall how often they appear in the book. A Hollywood TV studio (eyeing Frank's camera is Peter Lorre!) chimes with the Burbank TV studio in "The Americans." The echoes can even be from abroad. A Spanish parade, in 1952, looks ahead to the one in Hoboken, N.J.

Robert Frank’s “South Carolina,” part of the “Sideways” exhibit.

Most of all, there's race. That was the element in "The Americans" that was least still: Frank's matter-of-fact acknowledgment of so many otherwise-invisible men and women in US society. (Ralph Ellison, in his quiet, sly way, belongs on that transformative list, too.) The standout example in "Sideways" shows a black congregation exiting a funeral, in South Carolina, in 1955. The fact of their race is incidental to the fact of their grief. Presenting the mourners as a mosaic of visages — at least 13 faces are visible, no one of them looking in the same direction — Frank offers visual complexity as human complexity. Sometimes the most direct approach is sideways.

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ROBERT FRANK: SIDEWAYS

At Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 245 Maine St., Brunswick, Maine, through Jan. 29. 207-725-3275, www.bowdoin.edu/art-museum

Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.