Hotel--Gallup, New Mexico 1955

Robert Frank made this gelatin silver print, Hotel--Gallup, New Mexico, as part of his project to understand the temperature of 1950s America. The image shows a man who seems to be working at the front desk of a hotel. But more than the man himself, Frank directs our attention to the objects that surround him: a painting of a tiger, two masks, a sign with instructions for checkout time and refund policies. Each of these objects speaks to a different facet of American culture in the mid-20th century. Frank was a Swiss immigrant, and he was interested in the way that hotels, motels, and other temporary dwellings served as spaces for people from different backgrounds to converge and sometimes clash. We might think about the ways that Frank’s outsider status as a European might have shaped his perception and critique of American culture. To understand the social context of this photograph, we might consult historical archives and studies of American tourism in the 1950s, which would reveal the ways that the expansion of car culture shaped the physical and social landscape of the American West.