‘A wart-covered picture of America by a joyless man,” wrote the photographer and critic Minor White. “A sad poem by a very sick person,” snorted Popular Photography.

The object of their scorn was The Americans, a collection of images of American life by the photographer Robert Frank, who died last week, aged 94.

It is difficult today to recognise how revolutionary was Frank’s work when it was first published 60 years ago. His style, his mode of observation, his subject matter have all become so ingrained in contemporary photography that one can gauge their impact only by the derision that rained down upon him from mainstream critics.

Frank’s images broke most of the conventions of photography. They were not artfully framed or carefully balanced. They comprised “meaningless blur, grain, muddy exposures, drunken horizons and general sloppiness”, in the dismissive words of Popular Photography.

No US publisher would touch the book at first. It was first published in 1958 as Les Américains by the Parisian publisher Robert Delpire, in an edition garlanded by commentary from an extraordinary collection of writers – Simone de Beauvoir, William Faulkner, Henry Miller, John Steinbeck and others. The following year, it was finally published in the US, with an introduction by Jack Kerouac. “With one hand,” Kerouac observed, “he sucked a sad poem right out of America on to film.”

The book was the product of a two-year road trip across the nation. Breaking photographic conventions allowed Frank to capture a different America. He shot in gas stations and diners; he photographed cowboys and factory workers. There are photographs with smiles, but mostly it is a portrait of the melancholy and tension beneath the gloss and self-satisfaction of postwar America. They are images that seem as meaningful today as they were 60 years ago.

• Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist