America no number

1950

The group show “51 American Photographers” at MoMA

The year is momentous for Frank: after meeting Edward Steichen he takes part in the group show 51 American Photographers at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

1955

Seven photographs in “The Family of Man”

Edward Steichen includes seven of his photographs, many more than most other contributors, in the world-touring MoMA exhibition The Family of Man, which will be seen by 9 million visitors; they include a woman kissing her swaddled baby, a bowed old woman in Peru, a rheumy-eyed miner in Wales, and six laughing women in the window of the White Tower Hamburger Stand in New York City.

1955–1957

Across America on a Guggenheim Fellowship

Inspired by Jakob Tuggener’s Fabrik, Bill Brandt’s The English at Home and Walker Evans’s American Photographs, and on the recommendation of Evans, Alexey Brodovitch, Alexander Liberman, Edward Steichen and Meyer Schapiro, he secures a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1955 to travel across the United States and photograph all strata of its society, from Detroit and Dearborn to Savannah, Miami Beach and St. Petersburg, New Orleans, Houston, Los Angeles, Reno, Salt Lake City, Butte and Chicago. Over two years of road trips, part of them with his family, he takes 28,000 shots, of which he selects 83 for The Americans.

1955–1957

Jailed in Arkansas

In a small Arkansas town he is taken to the police station and put in jail: it comes out that he is Jewish because of a letter from the Guggenheim Foundation, and the sheriff says they will have to find somebody who speaks Yiddish. Frank later recalled that it was scary and nobody knew where he was; elsewhere in the South a sheriff told him he had “an hour to leave town”, and these incidents may have contributed to the dark view of America found in his work.