ROBERT FRANK (B. 1924)

Following his dual, consecutive Guggenheim Fellowships in 1955 and 1956, Robert Frank began crisscrossing the country, capturing scenes of Post-War America he felt were absent from mainstream depictions. Parade – Hoboken, New Jersey is the opening photograph of the resulting publication, The Americans, first published in 1958 in France and the following year by Grove Press in New York. The American flag appears four times across the eighty-two images that comprise The Americans, rendering four interpretations of the flag, and more so, its changing position as an icon of national identity.

Parade – Hoboken depicts two women obscured by the American flag, presenting a deeply critical (even if nuanced) interpretation of national identity. Taken during a celebration of the city of Hoboken’s centennial in March of 1955, the two women, despite standing a few feet apart, are oblivious to the other’s presence, each one framed by a brick wall. While one woman’s face is recessed in shadowed, the other’s is completely blocked by the billowing flag, her identity forever hidden. Frank commented that, 'This is a picture of two people who were standing behind one of the flags… They’re sort of hiding. . . [it is] a threatening picture.' As the opening image in his grand opus, this image set the tone for the rest of the book, cementing its role as one of the greatest of Frank’s images.
Other prints of this image reside in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.