ROBERT FRANK (1924-2019) New York Is (Suburban mothers are often kept busy as "chauffeurs"). 1958-59. Silver print, the image measuring 8¼x12 inches (21x30.5 cm.), with Frank's credit in ink and in pencil and a typed label, on verso.
"The salient, the ineluctable fact about New York, whether it is told lyrically or scientifically or historically--even denied strenuously--is that here is the pulse by which the heartbeat of the world is measured." --Gilbert Millstein, from the foreword of New York Is
Just before the American edition of The Americans was published, Lou Silverstein, then The New York Times' art director, hired Frank to make a series of photographs on the streets of New York for an advertising campaign for the newspaper titled "New York Is." The pictures were later compiled in a slim promotional book of the same name to attract prospective advertisers. Though commercial, the series exemplified Frank's hugely influential aesthetic. In 2019, The Times wrote: "[Louis] Silverstein always worked with the best photographers of the day, but to him, Frank's strangely tilted, overcast images of people putting up a building, trying on a hat, going to school, gossiping at a gallery 'were simply 10,000 times better than anybody else's I've ever seen.' With Frank, it was as much his heart as his eye that allowed him to make pictures that seemed as fully imagined as short stories: Embedded within the pictorial blur was a potent literary clarity, an emotional middle that somehow conveyed what had happened and what was about to happen. Reproduced New York Is (The New York Times, 1959), np
