Amazon.com Review
Armed with a camera and
a fresh cache of film and bankrolled by a Guggenheim Foundation
grant, Robert Frank crisscrossed the United States during 1955 and
1956. The photographs he brought back form a portrait of the
country at the time and hint at its future. He saw the hope of the
future in the faces of a couple at city hall in Reno, Nevada, and
the despair of the present in a grimy roofscape. He saw the roiling
racial tension, glamour, and beauty, and, perhaps because
Robert Frank was born in Zurich in 1924 to
parents of Jewish descent. He immigrated to the United States two
years after World War II ended, and since then he has produced work
that changed the history of art and photography. Groundbreaking
projects include The Americans, Lines of My Hand,
Black White and Things, Pull My Daisy and
Cocksucker Blues. Frank was the subject of a major
retrospective organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington,
in 1994. He was the recipient of the Hasselblad Award in 1996. A
major exhibition organized by The National Gallery of Art,
Looking In: Robert Frank''s "The Americans," will tour
nationally in 2009, with stops in Washington, San Francisco and New
York.