Tuggener was a role model for the younger artist, first mentioned to him by Frank's boss and mentor, Zurich commercial photographer Michael Wolgensinger (1913–1990) who felt that Frank would never fit the commercial system. Tuggener, as a serious artist who had left the commercial world behind, was the “one Frank really did love, from among all Swiss photographers,” according to Guido Magnaguagno and Tuggener's "Fabrik" (1943), as a photo book sequenced poetically and conceived without text like a silent movie, was a model for Frank's conception of "Les Américains" published fifteen years later in Paris by Delpire, in 1958.