In 1955, after being awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, Robert Frank set out to travel the United States, seeking ‘to portray Americans as they live at present. Their every day and their Sunday, their realism and dreams.’ The resulting body of work The Americans was published first in France in 1958 and then in the US the following year. Contrasting the powerful against the powerless, the project ‘signifies the kind of civilization born here and spreading elsewhere.’ Although Frank had travelled extensively in Europe and South America, he was not prepared for segregation in the American South; for him ‘that was the strongest and most unforgettable impression. The injustice to people who have another skin color.’ The present work Charleston, South Carolina shows a black nanny holding a white baby. ‘I found it extraordinary,’ Frank comments, ‘that whites would give their children to black women when they wouldn’t allow women to sit next to them in a drugstore. I did very few pictures that made a political point like this.’