An unprecedented exhibition at Stanford University’s Cantor Arts Center will present Robert Frank’s American photographs from the 1950s as a cohesive whole. Frank, a Swiss-born photographer, is best known for his profoundly influential book “The Americans.” In 1955 and 1956, with support from a Guggenheim Fellowship, Frank traveled throughout the United States photographing ordinary people in their everyday lives. The book, which was published in France in 1959, features 83 photographs, mostly from those travels. Frank explored the various levels of the country’s social strata, both high and low, unveiling a ubiquitous sense of loneliness, alienation, and angst. For the first time ever, the exhibition at the Cantor Arts Center will explore the largely forgotten photographs that pre-dated and followed Frank’s canonical work.
“Robert Frank in America” features 130 photographs drawn primarily from the Cantor’s collection. Donated to the institution in the mid-1980s by Stanford alumnus Bowen H. McCoy and his colleague Raymond B. Gary, the Cantor’s holdings span the full range of Frank’s photographic career before he turned to filmmaking in the early 1960s.
