In the mid 1950s Robert Frank went on a number of road trips through the United States inspired by Walker Evans’ book American Photographs. In 1959 (a year earlier in France) a selection of the images he took on those trips was published in The Americans, a book that became one of the key photobooks in the history of photography, paving the way for the country-wide photographic pilgrimages that were taken on by subsequent generations of photographers such as Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, Joel Sternfeld, and Stephen Shore.

Distanced from the optimism of humanist photography, Robert Frank’s images capture a disenchanted perspective on the American dream. The ironic way in which he portrayed an alienated and sterile country and the ragged aesthetic of the photographs, that were occasionally blurry, out of focus, fragmented and apparently fortuitous, conform a novel visual language. After publishing The Americans the photographer began to take an interest in film. This photograph was taken at a talent agency during those initial years of cinematic experimentation and maintains the aesthetic from his classic photobook. Robert Frank’s entire body of work follows the tradition of New York school urban photography.