This is a photograph by Robert Frank, appearing in the collection Les Americains (The Americans). Jack Kerouac singled this out as his favorite image in the foreword to the American edition of the book. Artists, like ethnographers, train their eyes to see things other people don’t see. They try to present what they see so that we, the audience, can glimpse something where we have looked a thousand times and failed to find anything noteworthy. So in a similar way here Robert frank noticed this young girl and the essence of her presence. The projection in the girls eyes in not about the social reality of the 50’s in USA, but it is about the doubt of her fate, of our fate. So this photograph fails to transmit information about this social event but simultaneously succeeds to elevate the main element of the composition when all the bleary abstract elements stays in the background to charge emotionally the image.
An image, which was taken for journalistic purposes, and that fact, is the reason that makes it on of the best in the book “The Americans”.
Research:
The Americans by Robert Frank
Wikipedia, Elevator Miami Beach.
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