Title
US 91, leaving Blackfoot, Idaho
1956
printed 1960s
Artist
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Details
- Dates
- 1956
printed 1960s - Media category
- Photograph
- Materials used
- gelatin silver photograph
- Dimensions
- 20.4 x 30 cm image; 27.6 x 35.2 cm sheet
- Signature & date
Signed l.r., recto sheet, black ink 'Robert Frank.' Dated l.l., recto sheet, black ink, '...1956'
- Credit
- Purchased with funds provided by The Russell Mills Foundation, 2015
- Location
- Not on display
- Accession number
- 405.2015
- Copyright
- © Robert Frank, from The Americans
- Artist information
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Robert Frank
Works in the collection
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About
This image was an important inclusion in Robert Frank’s explosive 1958 book The Americans. A book of 83 photographs published first in France and then in the US in 1959, America was revealed as a country and culture deeply flawed. Perhaps only an outsider (Frank was Swiss) could have presented such a dispassionate view of the realities of post War USA. US 91, Leaving Blackfoot Idaho shows two young men picked up by the photographer. Though the men seem intently focussed on the road, the car windows are blank. A text by the English philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon is in the visor; this Frank had copied down when he visited Dorothea Lange before he set off on his epic journey to find the heart of America. That text reads: 'The contemplation of things as they are/without error or confusion/without substitution or imposture/is in itself a nobler thing/than a whole harvest of invention.'
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Bibliography
Referenced in 2 publications
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Robert Frank, The Americans, Paris, 1958.
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Sarah Greenough, Looking In: Robert Frank's The Americans, Washington, 2009, 248.
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