Trolley—New Orleans

1955

Robert Frank

Artist, American, born Switzerland, 1924 - 2019

This horizontal black and white photograph shows the exterior of a trolley car cropped to show only the mid-section with six passengers inside. The passengers look out of five windows on the left side of the trolley, so their bodies face our left in profile. The four people at the front end, to our left, are white; two people at the back, to our right, are Black. From left to right: a man looks out through the glass of the closed window along the left edge of the photograph. The remaining windows are open. An older woman wearing a dark coat looks at us from under arched eyebrows, lips pursed, out of the next window, to our right. A boy and a young girl look out of the central window. Closer inspection reveals the dark form of a woman next to them, lost in the shadowy interior of the trolley. In the next window, a Black man wearing a long-sleeved, button-down shirt leans onto the window ledge with both forearms, and, in the right-most window, a woman wearing glasses looks over her shoulder, up and away from us. That last window is cropped by the edge of the photograph. The scene behind us is reflected in glass panes above the seats on the exterior of the trolley.
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Are there no happy riders on this New Orleans trolley? Each person stares from their own window as if jailed in their seat. With severe-looking white passengers in front and weary Black riders relegated to the back, the streetcar epitomizes segregated life in the American South in the 1950s. Photographer Robert Frank, a Swiss émigré to the United States, journeyed across the country in 1955 and 1956 to document American life. Through innovative photographs like this one, he revealed a society that, similar to the diverse gazes of the people on this trolley, was divided.


Artwork overview

  • Medium

    gelatin silver print

  • Credit Line

    Gift of Maria and Lee Friedlander

  • Dimensions

    sheet: 21 x 31.6 cm (8 1/4 x 12 7/16 in.)

  • Accession

    2001.8.1

  • Copyright

    © June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation


Artwork history & notes

Provenance

Lee Friedlander, New City, New York, 1977; gift to NGA, 2001.

Associated Names

Exhibition History

1977

  • Robert Frank, Yajima Galerie, Montreal, Quebec, 5 - 29 October 1977.

2015

  • In Light of the Past: Celebrating Twenty-Five Years of Collecting Photographs at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, May 3 – July 26, 2015

Inscriptions

lower left in black ink: Robert Frank 1956; by later hand, upper left verso in graphite: RF-770-121

Wikidata ID

Q64166089


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