Mary, Pablo, and Andrea, 1954
Gelatin silver print, printed in the 1960’s
Image size: 9 × 13 ½ in
Framed size: 18 ⅛ × 22 ¼ in
March 25, 2024
This tender photograph offers an intimate glimpse into Robert Frank’s family life in the 1950s. His wife Mary is seen nursing their infant daughter Andrea, with their son Pablo by her side. Mary was a young artist as well, who had recently studied with Martha Graham and Hans Hoffman, and at the time, the couple was living with their two children in the midst of the bohemian artistic scene in the East Village.
Robert Frank took this photograph in 1954, the same year he successfully applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship. The funding allowed him to spend the following years traveling across the United States with Mary and their children, making radically honest photographs of people in the farthest flung corners of the country. These were the photographs which were presented in his book The Americans (published in the United States in 1959), which quickly became a sacred text for photographers, forever reshaping ideas about what a photograph can reveal. The unblinking candor that we see in this earlier picture served as the basis for the photographs he began making the following year—an unvarnished way of seeing people which altered the self-image of the country itself.
