 Robert Frank (American, born Switzerland 1924) Charleston, 1956 Silver gelatin print Purchase, 1989 (20601) American photographer and documentary filmmaker Robert
Frank’s most notable body of work, The Americans, 1955-57,
provided a fresh view of American society. Critic Sean O’Hagan,
writing in The Guardian in 2014, said The Americans "changed
the nature of photography, what it could say and how it could say
it." Frank immigrated to the United States in 1947, securing a job in
New York City as a fashion photographer, but soon left to travel in
South America and Europe. Returning to New York in 1950,
Frank met photographer and curator Edward Steichen and
participated in the group show 51 American Photographers which
Steichen organized at the Museum of Modern Art. Frank secured
a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 1955 to travel
across the United States and photograph, visiting places in the
South, the Midwest, West and West Coast during which he took
28,000 shots. Shortly after returning to New York in 1957, Frank met writer Jack
Kerouac and showed him the photographs from his travels.
Kerouac immediately offered to write something about these
pictures, and he contributed the introduction to the U.S. edition of
the 1958 book The Americans, in which 83 of the images were
reproduced. In his introduction Kerouac reflects on this nurse and
her charge in Charleston, South Carolina. ". . . the sweet little
white baby in the black nurse's arms both of them bemused in
Heaven, a picture that should have been blown up and hung in
the streets of Little Rock showing love under the sky and the
womb of our universe the Mother . . ." |