The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans

September 22, 2009 – January 3, 2010

The 50th anniversary of the publication of The Americans, Robert Frank’s ground-breaking book of black-and-white photographs, will be celebrated at The Metropolitan Museum of Art with the major exhibition “Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans,” on view through January 3, 2010.

Robert Frank is one of the great living masters of photography, and his seminal book The Americans captured a culture on the brink of social upheaval. The exhibition traces the artist’s process of creating this once-controversial suite of photographs, which grew out of several cross-country road trips in 1955 and 1956.

Born in Switzerland in 1924, Frank was an outsider encountering much of America for the first time; he discovered its power, its vastness, and—at times—its troubling emptiness. Although Frank’s depiction of American life was criticized when the book was released in the U.S. in 1959, The Americans soon became recognized as a masterpiece of 20th-century art.

“Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans” features all 83 photographs from his original book. Remarkably, the exhibition at the Metropolitan will be the first time that this body of work is presented in its entirety to a New York audience.

The exhibition is made possible by Access Industries and the Blavatnik Family Foundation.

Additional support is provided by the William Randolph Hearst Foundation.

The exhibition was organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Robert Frank, Trolley—New Orleans, 1955,
The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
Gilman Collection, Purchase,
Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Gift, 2005.
Photograph © Robert Frank, from The Americans.