While Robert Frank primarily traveled alone while taking the images that would culminate in the publication of The Americans, his wife, Mary, and small children, Pablo and Andrea, joined him in Houston in November 1955 and traveled with him all the way to Los Angeles where they rented a house for the winter. The family stayed together through March, and Mary helped Frank write the application for the renewal of his Guggenheim Fellowship before flying home with the children. This diptych, in which Pablo peers out from behind the curtains of a sparsely furnished motel room, showcases a playful side to Frank’s photography not always evident. The diptych looks forward to the work Frank would create in the 1970s and 80s that dealt more directly with personal themes.
The diptych was illustrated in the 1972 Japanese edition of Frank’s book Lines of My Hand. While Frank consistently located this photograph in Gallup, New Mexico, the locale is more probably Kingman, Arizona, according to Paul Roth, former Archivist of the Robert Frank collection at the National Gallery of Art.
