Chicken farm--San Fernando, California
1956
Image not available — this artwork is under copyright
View on museum website →Medium
gelatin silver print
Dimensions
sheet: 20.3 x 25.2 cm (8 x 9 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
1990.28.764
Art Historical Context
**Chicken Farm—San Fernando, California**1956) by Robert captures a gritty slice of mid-20th-century American life. Taken during Frank's epic cross-country road trip on a Guggenheim Fellowship, this image is part of the series that became his landmark photobook *The Americans* (1958). A Swiss-born photographer who immigrated to the U.S Frank documented the nation's contradictions—prosperity shadowed by isolation and everyday struggle—in the post-World War II era. Here, the modest chicken farm in California's San Fernando Valley evokes the rural undercurrents amid booming suburbia and agricultu...
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...