The Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank immersed himself in American culture not long after he moved to New York in 1947. Seven years later, a Guggenheim Foundation grant enabled him to drive across the United States and shoot seven hundred fifty rolls of film over the next year and a half. Of this experience Frank later said: “I just kept on photographing. Kept on looking.” The resulting book of eighty-three photographs entitled The Americans (published in 1958 in France and in 1959 in the United States) was revolutionary both for style and subject matter. The out-of-focus, grainy photographs are casually composed and framed, like views snapped out of a car window; people’s faces are hard to read, and sometimes obscured. Frank’s vision of Eisenhower-era America was not one of a prosperous and confident post war boom, but rather offered unidealized, antiheroic, and anticlimactic glimpses of everyday life.