Robert Frank

The photographer to Michael and Michele Marvins

Gift of the above to the present owner

Robert Frank, The Americans (New York, 1958), p. 118

Robert Frank: The Aperture History of Photography Series (Millerton: Aperture, 1976), p. 65

Sarah Greenough and Philip Brookman, Robert Frank: Moving Out (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1994), p. 199

Robert Frank, The Americans (New York, 1995), p. 118

Robert Frank: Story Lines (London: Tate Modern, 2004), p. 2 (contact sheet with 4 variants)

Sarah Greenough, Looking In: Robert Frank’s “The Americans” (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2009), pp. 277 and 475

“But where [Walker] Evans saw objects, the vernacular, and the past, Frank saw people, the present, and the very pressing issue of racism. A place of deprivation and triumph, Beaufort, for Frank, was epitomized...by an African American woman with a soaring smile seated in a field with a cross-like telephone pole looming on the horizon behind her.” (Sarah Greenough, Looking In: Robert Frank's "The Americans", p. 122)

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, began collecting the work of Robert Frank in the early 1980s, organizing the seminal exhibition Robert Frank: New York to Nova Scotia in 1986 and co-producing the first documentary about the artist that same year. Today, the Museum owns more than 400 photographs by Frank, including the original maquette for his seminal photobook The Americans, from which the present photograph is a key image.