Ranch Market, Hollywood
Artist
Robert Frank
(American, born in Switzerland, 1924–2019)
Date1956
Mediumgelatin silver print
Dimensionsimage: 20.8 × 31.6 cm (8 3/16 × 12 7/16 in.)
sheet: 27.8 × 35.2 cm (10 15/16 × 13 7/8 in.)
sheet: 27.8 × 35.2 cm (10 15/16 × 13 7/8 in.)
ClassificationsPhotographs
Credit LineMuseum Purchase through the Gift of Mrs. Joseph Goodhue
Object number1983.34
Label TextTaken during three trips across the United States in the mid-1950s, Robert Frank’s The Americans is a collection of eighty-three grainy, off-kilter black-and-white photographs that revolutionized photography through their embrace of the snapshot aesthetic.
Perceived as a scathing reprisal of postwar America, The Americans went without a U.S. publisher until 1959, around the same time Pop Art made its way to American shores from England. Though despised by many critics, including the editor of Popular Photography who called the book “a sad poem for sick people,” few could discount the radical shift it signaled for the future of the medium. The Americans claims a wide range of admirers including photographers Garry Winogrand and Nan Goldin (represented here), Pop artist Ed Ruscha, and rock-n-roll acts The Rolling Stones and Bruce Springsteen.
ProvenanceRobert Klein Gallery, Ltd., Boston, MAOn View
Not on view
