Though Frank is best known for images of the American milieu in the 1950s, he has been active in photography since 1942, including fashion photography, photojournalism and film. He was the first European photographer to receive a Guggenheim fellowship (1955); the work he produced while travelling in the United States on this grant, published as Les Americans (The Americans), documented his reactions to the eateries, highways, juke-boxes, and other commonplaces of 1950s American life. These things had so surrounded the native born that it took an outsider to reveal them as extraordinary and worth recording.

By 1966 Frank had stopped making still photographs, concentrating on filmmaking instead, but his vision had established a new style in documentary still photography: openly subjective rather than ostensibly objective, interpretive rather than factual.