PHOTOGRAPHS
Frank, Robert Louis
Switzerland / U.S. (1924 - 2019)
View from Hotel Window, Butte, Montana
1955
Gelatin silver print
8 1/2 x 12 15/16 in. (21.6 x 32.9 cm) image size;11 1/16 x 13 15/16 in. (28.1 x 35.4 cm) sheet size
Monsen Study Collection of Photography, gift of Joseph and Elaine Monsen
FA 92.9

In 1958 the young photographer Robert Frank published The Americans, a collection of eighty-three black-and-white photographs made during several treks back and forth across the United States. The book's casually composed pictures of anti-heroic subjects--the interior of a nondescript diner, a tattered American flag, a dirty hotel window that opens onto a view of a depressed town--suggest the photographer's gloomy, skeptical view of post-war America. Like the Beat authors with whom he was quickly identified, Frank was vilified by critics for challenging the prevailing optimism of Cold War popular culture in the United States. His work of the 1960s, suggestively referred to as "downer picturesque" by one contemporary author, reintroduced the possibility of a critical engagement with the social world after a generation of vanguard formalism. The impact of Frank's potent blend of a casual pictorial aesthetic with loaded subjects from the American scene is directly evident in the work of Diane Arbus, William Eggleston, Lee Friedlander, and Garry Winogrand. -- Label copy for The Photographic Impulse: A Critical History of Photography, The Joseph and Elaine Monsen Collection, Cincinnati Art Museum, October 12, 2001 to January 6, 2002.