Robert Frank

Collection of Mary Frank, 2004

Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York, 2007

Private Collection

Sotheby's New York, The Inventive Eye: Photographs from a Private Collection, 1 April 2014, Sale 9129, Lot 9

Acquired from the above by the present owner 

'2nd Prize—Individual Pictures: The Poet's Camera Sees Everything,' LIFE, 26 November 1951, p. 21 

Photography at The Museum of Modern Art Bulletin, vol. XIX, no. 4, 1952, cover

Robert Frank (New York:Aperture, 1976), p. 89

Robert Frank, The Lines of My Hand (New York, 1989), unpaginated

Robert Frank, Black White and Things (Washington, D. C.: National Gallery of Art, 1994), pl. 20

Sarah Greenough and Philip Brookman, Robert Frank: Moving Out (Washington, D. C.: National Gallery of Art, 1994), p. 31

Sarah Greenough, Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans (Washington, D. C.: National Gallery of Art, 2009), p. 46 and pl. 45 

Street Line, New York (34th Street) figured prominently in Robert Frank's early career in New York.  It was among the first four photographs by Frank purchased by The Museum of Modern Art in 1950, and was shown later that year in 51 American Photographers, an exhibition at MoMA including new works by Harry Callahan, Irving Penn, Frederick Sommer, and Art Sinsabaugh, among others. 

At Edward Steichen’s urging, Frank had entered LIFE magazine’s Young Photographers Contest in the fall of 1951 and was awarded second prize in the ‘Individual Pictures’ category.  LIFE published three photographs—Street Line, My Family, and Paris/Tulip—in its 26 November issue, under the title, 'The Poet’s Camera Sees Everything,' with the following text:

"Second Prize was won by Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank, 27. A contest judge called him 'a poet with a camera,' and Frank himself declares, 'When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.' Scorning trick pictures and overdone fads, Frank aims his camera at familiar 'little' things—his wife nursing their child, an empty street in Manhattan, a young man who has bought a flower to surprise his girl—and from these he tries 'to capture a moment.' By Frank’s stubbornly high standards such moments are scarce. 'I can be happy if I have a few good pictures,' he says, 'no one has a very good one very often.'"

Street Line, New York was selected by the photographer in 1952 for his planned, but at the time unpublished, volume, Black White and Things, the definitive statement of the young photographer’s work in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The book is divided into three sections, as suggested by the title, and Street Line appears as the final plate in the book's White section. This strikingly graphic image of an empty 34th Street in Manhattan presages the famous U. S. 285, New Mexico (see Lot 32) published in The Americans later in the decade.