Oct 19, 2017 - Sale 2458

Sale 2458 - Lot 206

Price Realized: $ 13,750
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 15,000 - $ 25,000
ROBERT FRANK (1924- )
Fishkill, N.Y. (Newburgh). Silver print, the image measuring 11 3/4x7 7/8 inches (29.8x20 cm.), the sheet 13 7/8x10 7/8 inches (35.2x27.6 cm), with Frank's signature, title, and negative date, in ink, on recto. 1955; printed circa 1969
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Additional Details

Gifted by Frank to the Present Owner.

Fishkill, NY is a key image reproduced in Frank's groundbreaking title The Americans, which was first published as Les Americains, in France, in 1958, The book's masterful selection and sequencing of images has been reprinted in several different editions and is a cult classic to this day.

In the mid-1950s, Frank (a Swiss emigré) traveled throughout the U.S. on a Guggenheim Fellowship shooting images of motorcycles, cars, highways, flags, bars, diners, and parades in addition to the African American experience. These popular tropes of American culture were employed to simultaneously convey and challenge prevailing notions of what it meant to be identified as an American during the purportedly sunny Eisenhower years.

Frank, like his buddy Jack Kerouac (who wrote the introduction for the first American edition of the book), loved the freedom of the open road, which is captured in this image of bikers in upstate NY.

Frank, The Americans (Grove Press), p. 88.