Interior of car wash--Gallup, New Mexico
1955
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
1990.28.504
Art Historical Context
Step into the gritty underbelly of 1950s America with Robert's *Interior of car wash—Gallup, New Mexico* (1955), a gelatin silver print that captures a fleeting moment inside a roadside car wash along historic Route 66. Swiss-born Frank, who became an iconic chronicler of the American road trip, traversed the U.S. in a used Ford, snapping over 28,000 images. This poignant photograph is one of 83 selected for his groundbreaking 1959 book *The Americans*, which offered a raw, unflinching portrait of postwar prosperity's hidden tensions—alienation, transience, and everyday labor. Frank's candid,...
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...