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Lot Essay
‘It was the first time I was in the South, and the first time I really saw segregation. I found it extraordinary that whites would give their children to black women when they wouldn't allow the women to sit by them in the drugstore. I did very few pictures that made a political point like this.’ – Robert Frank
When Frank applied to the Guggenheim Foundation for his scholarship, he stated that his intention was to ‘photograph freely throughout the United States, in order to make ‘a broad, voluminous picture record of things American, past and present’, and that the project would be ‘the visual study of a civilization’.
Emigrating from Switzerland, Frank was an outsider to this ‘civilization’, and undoubtedly this distance helped him capture so uncannily the endemic alienation and racism of postwar America.
When Frank applied to the Guggenheim Foundation for his scholarship, he stated that his intention was to ‘photograph freely throughout the United States, in order to make ‘a broad, voluminous picture record of things American, past and present’, and that the project would be ‘the visual study of a civilization’.
Emigrating from Switzerland, Frank was an outsider to this ‘civilization’, and undoubtedly this distance helped him capture so uncannily the endemic alienation and racism of postwar America.