Taken shortly after he immigrated to the United States in
1947, this image is one of the first that earned the Swiss-born photographer Robert
Frank recognition in his new country. This view of an empty 34th Street, a
white traffic line leading from the camera to the distant valley between
buildings, struck a chord in New York. A shot taken just a moment earlier was
purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in 1950 and featured in Life magazine in 1951. Though it was
made a full decade before Frank’s groundbreaking photobook The Americans (1959), this image shares the disaffected sensibility
of those later photographs, which reveal an outsider’s perspective on the
nation’s people and places.