Louis Tejada: Robert Frank’s America

After watching the short video on a recent exhibition at Stanford University’s Cantor Center for Visual Arts in which the exhibition highlighted Robert Frank’s seminal photography book The Americans (1958) and also the photographs that didn’t make it into the publication. The themes that were addressed in Frank’s photographs I found them to be artistic, bleak and political because they were photographs that each had at least one of these themes present. In addition, Frank took these types of photographs because America was bleak and the people in the photographs looked distracted or were bored/alienated since the United States was victorious in World War II. One of the photographs that was shown in the short video was a black woman holding a white baby and taking care of it and the curator Peter Galassi pointed out how when Frank took this photograph Frank couldn’t understand why a white woman would leave their baby to be taken care of by a black woman and trust the black woman. However, the white woman wouldn’t sit with the black woman at the lunch counter which really shocked Frank and showed the racial segregation because during this time where there was a lot of racism between the whites and people of color which eventually led to the Civil Rights Movement. In the end, Robert Frank as a photographer was able to capture the lifestyle of the Americans and as well give a sense of the country at the time.