Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Charleston, South Carolina
Robert Frank American, born Switzerland
Not on view
Robert Frank moved to the United States in 1947 and, like so many other Jewish émigrés, was initially impressed by New York’s postwar optimism. By the mid-1950s, however, when the elation of the war’s end had worn off, Frank was well aware of America’s deep economic stratifications, growing conservative tendencies, and pervasive racism. He included this dramatic work in The Americans (1958/59), his landmark book of photographs that almost single-handedly changed the discourse of American photographic practice. Jack Kerouac, the Beat poet who wrote the introduction to the publication, commented that the photographer had "sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film, taking rank among the tragic poets of the world. To Robert Frank I now give this message: You got eyes."
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