Robert Frank

Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York, circa 2000

The Americans, no. 69

Greenough, Sarah, Looking In: Robert Frank’s “The Americans” (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2009), pp. 294, 479, and 480, and Contact no. 69

Maloney, Tom, ed., ‘The Year’s Best Pictures…U.S. Camera 1958,’ U.S. Camera Publishing Corp., New York, 1957, p. 101

Robert Frank: Story Lines (Tate Modern, London, 2004), frontispiece 5

Michael Shelden, 'Melancholy and Menace,' Telegraph Magazine, 3 May 2008, p. 34

“Sitting around in the drugstore. I remember often going into Woolworth's. I photographed a lot. . . I'd get a Coke. . . Normally when I came to a town, it was the first place I went to. For some reason I found it very heartening.” - Robert Frank

This view of a busy lunch counter in Detroit, Michigan was taken during Robert Frank’s two year, Guggenheim Fellowship-funded trip across the country that would ultimately result in his seminal 1958 photobook, The Americans. Frank took a great number of photographs in Detroit: settings including a frenetic assembly line at the Ford Motor company, a drive-in movie theater, and Belle Isle, an island park on the border with Canada. Nine of the eighty-three photographs in The Americans were made in Detroit, more than in any other locale.

Many images taken during Frank’s travels were in restaurants, cafes, bars, and automats. Aside from a place to eat and rest, these were comfortable, yet bustling places where Frank could quietly sit and observe the social behaviors inherent to various communities across the nation.

This is the largest print of this image to come to auction. Three smaller prints of this image have sold at Sotheby’s, one of which was part of the December 2015 auction Robert Frank: The Americans The Ruth And Jake Bloom Collection. Prints of this image are in several museum collections including the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C., the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.