Guggenheim 616--San Francisco 1956

Robert Frank made this photographic contact sheet, ‘Guggenheim 616—San Francisco’, in the United States. It consists of various scenes: people around a table, a child on a sofa, and a street scene featuring a vending machine. Frank, who immigrated to the US from Switzerland, often trained his lens on overlooked corners of American society. In this work, the range of scenes and people hints at the diversity within San Francisco, whilst the contact sheet format itself—an indexical record of the photographer’s working process—suggests the role of the photographer as a kind of social surveyor or observer. As a photographer who was partly supported by a Guggenheim fellowship, we might ask: what role do institutions play in deciding which aspects of American life are worthy of artistic attention? To understand Frank’s vision, we might look to sources such as his application for the Guggenheim fellowship, as well as his published book, The Americans, which offers a powerful visual commentary on American life in the 1950s.