The Atlantic

Remembering Robert Frank Through the Portraits Others Took of Him

One way to commemorate the late photographer, who pioneered the “snapshot aesthetic,” is to see him the way other artists did.
Source: Danny Lyon / Magnum Photos

A man stands at the edge of a crowd of onlookers on a paper-littered city street. We cannot see what they are all looking at, but he stands there, also watching. Unlike most of the others in the crowd, he is not wearing a hat, and his pin-striped suit seems oversize for his small frame. While many of the other bystanders raise their head and peer over those in front of them, he looks ever so slightly to the left. Something else has caught his attention.

The man at the center of this 1947 image, by Louis Faurer,

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