“To Robert Frank I now give this message: You got eyes.” – Jack Kerouac

Robert Frank drove into Butte, Montana in May of 1956, after receiving word of the renewal of the Guggenheim Fellowship funding his project to create a photographic document of America. He traveled from San Francisco through Nevada and Utah, making photographs in each state that would be included in his final selection of images for The Americans, before heading north to Montana. Butte was, in its own way, a classic western town, home to one of the largest mineral mining operations in the world and with a rough and rowdy reputation. While Frank may have had hopes of photographing mining operations in the area, as he had covered the automobile industry in Detroit, what ultimately inspired him were scenes that fell outside the industrial life of the town: a table game in a luncheonette; a woman and her children in their car; and the photograph offered here, taken from the window of the Hotel Finlen which captures the rooftops of the town in mid-light. In his free-form introduction to The Americans, Jack Kerouac wrote that Frank ‘sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film, taking rank among the tragic poets of the world. To Robert Frank I now give this message: You got eyes' – an observation which resonates strongly with this image.

This photograph was for years in the celebrated collection of Joseph E. Seagram & Sons, one of the first corporations to start a collection of photographs. Under the auspices of Phyllis Lambert, the collection was initiated in 1972 by legendary curator Pierre Apraxine who drew together works that addressed the urban experience. In 1974, Richard Pare took over the curatorial reigns, continuing Apraxine’s focus on superb images of exceptional print quality. The Seagram Collection of photographs was sold at Phillips in 2002, comprising a highly successful two-day auction that presented the collection in-full for the first time.