America in Black and White: The Americans Revisited (Exhibit/NYC)

The exhibition Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans, now on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, tells the story of the making of one of the most important photography books of the twentieth century and one of the most consequential works produced by a modern Swiss artist. Robert Frank, born in 1924 in Zürich to a Jewish family, moved to New York City in 1947. As so many post-war visitors and émigrés from Europe had discovered, New York was a fascinating place, but it was not (and is not) representative of the United States as a nation. You can argue whether that is because New York is either too American or not nearly American enough, but anyone who really wants to see and understand the country needs to step west of the Hudson River.