Automobile and buildings--San Francisco
1956
Image not available — this artwork is under copyright
View on museum website →Medium
gelatin silver print
Dimensions
sheet: 25.3 x 20.2 cm (9 15/16 x 7 15/16 in.)
Classification
Photograph
Department
CPH
Museum
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Credit
Robert Frank Collection, Gift of Robert Frank
Accession Number
1990.28.854
Art Historical Context
**Automobile and Buildings—San Francisco** (1956) captures the pulse of mid-20th-century America through the lens of Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank. Taken during his transformative cross-country road trip funded by a Guggenheim Fellowship, this gelatin silver print is one of 83 images from his groundbreaking book *The Americans* (1958–59). Frank's work pierced the era's optimistic postwar facade, revealing the mundane, the isolated, and the overlooked in everyday scenes like this San Francisco street view, where a sleek automobile nestles amid towering urban structures. As a master of s...
About the Artist
Robert Frank
Robert Frank (1924-2019) was a Swiss-American photographer and documentary filmmaker whose revolutionary approach to documentary photography fundamentally transformed the medium and influenced generations of artists. Born in Zurich, Switzerland, on November 9, 1924, to a middle-class Jewish family, Frank began his photographic apprenticeship in 1941, working with commercial photographers before im...