dovitch. This association was short-lived, however,
for by the fall he had quit to work as a freelance
photographer, completing assignments, including
fashion shoots, for a variety of publications, in-
cluding magazines and newspapers, including the
picture magazinesLifeandLook, andThe New
York Times. Purchasing a 35 mm rangefinder Leica,
Frank began a series of travels, notably to Peru and
Bolivia, he arranged these series, using original
prints, in book form. He met his future wife, Mary
Lockspeiser, in the late 1940s as well; they married
in 1950. Mary Frank, from whom Robert sepa-
rated in 1969, went on to become a well-known
artist working primarily in ceramics. The year
1950 marked his introduction as an exhibiting
photographer when he was included in the seminal
group exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art
(MoMA), New York,51 American Photographers.
Following the birth of their first child, Pablo, in
1951, the Frank family relocated to Paris. Frank
traveled to the United Kingdom, where he photo-
graphed in London and later Wales (1953). In Eng-
land, Frank came to know and admire the work of
Bill Brandt, and somewhat under his aesthetic
influence, made a series of pictures of coalminers.
These early works from London and Wales were
reissued in book form in 2003. Back in Paris in
1952, he met Edward Steichen, in Europe to
research photographers for exhibitions at MoMA,
includingThe Family of Man, which was mounted
in 1955. Traveling extensively during this period of
his life, Frank returned to New York in 1953, where
he became friends with Walker Evans and with
whom he later worked as an assistant. Evans’s
book,American Photographs, was also highly influ-
ential on Frank’s rapidly developing ideas about
the sequencing of photographs. His second child,
Andrea, was born in 1954, and he met poet Allen
Ginsberg, who was to become a important influ-
ence and collaborator. He also took his first photo-
graph for what would becomeThe Americansat a
Fourth of July event in Upstate New York (Fourth
of July—Jay, New York). Frank’s restless desire to
travel was facilitated in 1955 when he received a
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
fellowship, the first European to receive such a
grant. With this grant and its extension in 1956,
he crisscrossed the United States, photographing
in New Jersey, Chicago, Detroit, North and South
Carolina, Hollywood, the western states of Mon-
tana, Idaho, Nevada, and Nebraska, the southwest
in Arizona and New Mexico, especially along
Route 66, at that time the main artery across the
nation, along the Mississippi River in the deep
south, and Texas. After photographing the inaugu-
ration of Dwight D. Eisenhower for his second term
in 1957, Frank selected and printed the works for
his envisioned book.
While attempting to find a publisher, he worked
on his first film, a 16 mm short shot in Florida with
beat writer Jack Kerouac, whom he’d asked to
write an introduction for his book. Later, commen-
tators note that Frank was reacting to the massive
project which he had assisted on (and was included
in, both with his own works and in a portrait of
him and his wife by Louis Fauer), Steichen’sThe
Family of Man. Kerouac’s introduction is dia-
metrically opposed to the humanistic, often roman-
tically idealistic language of Carl Sandburg’s
introduction toFamily. Frank shared with Ker-
ouac, whom he’d met in New York, a more realistic
image—some might even say it was cynical—of
postwar America, and its social structures, includ-
ing the rampant segregation, the vast divide
between rich and poor, the dark fears aroused by
the Cold War, and the constant threat of nuclear
holocaust, the alienation of youth exemplified by
the emerging ‘‘beatnik’’ culture that Kerouac so
brilliantly chronicled. That he couldn’t find an
American publisher was not entirely unexpected,
as frustrating as it was. This would change with a
trip back to Paris, and the embracing of the project
by visionary publisher Robert Delpire. The book,
first published in 1958, has never been out of print.
Opening with a now-classic image of two figures
standing at windows of a ordinary brick structure,
the American flag streaming across the center top of
the picture (Parade—Hoboken, New Jersey), 82
images follow, showing, in gritty, dense tonalities, a
panoply of American life. Politicians in top hats
contrast with African Americans attending a funeral
in their fedoras and straw boaters (Funeral—St.
Helena, South Carolina). A glamorous Hollywood
starlet (Movie Premiere—Hollywood) contrasts a
Hollywood counter waitress (Ranch Market—Holly-
wood). The works are exquisitely selected and pre-
sented, forming rhythms and meanings that
interweave throughout the book. The ‘‘great
themes’’ ofThe Family of Manarelikewisepre-
sented, yet they speak quietly, without the stage-
managing of emotions of that project. Death is
juxtaposed poignantly with the joy of living through
the sequencing of a picture of an exuberantly smil-
ing African American woman sitting in a chair
against the setting sun of a weedy field (Beaufort,
South Carolina) and a funeral view on the next page
that shows an elderly African American in his cof-
fin, formally attired men passing respectfully by
(Funeral—St. Helena, South Carolina). The ‘‘exotic’’
is found in a cowboy leaning against a waste can inFRANK, ROBERT