Robert Frank: Trolley—New Orleans

MoMA One on One Series

by Lucy Gallun (Contributor), Robert Frank (Photographer)

Traveling through New Orleans on a cross-country road trip in 1955, the Swiss born photographer Robert Frank snapped a picture of a passing streetcar. The result, Trolley—New Orleans, is a searing image of everyday racism. The streetcar’s riders, framed by the vehicle’s windows, are divided by race: white passengers sit in front, Black passengers in back, as mandated by Louisiana law under Jim Crow. When Trolley—New Orleans appeared on the cover of Frank’s landmark photobook The Americans in 1959, New Orleans’s streetcars had been desegregated for more than a year, but the civil rights struggles of the 1960s still lay ahead. In this volume of the MoMA One on One series, an essay by curator Lucy Gallun explores the image in the context of The Americans—an iconic portrait of Frank’s adopted country—and in relation to other photographs of the 1950s and ’60s, illuminating the essential role that pictures such as Trolley—New Orleans have played in the ongoing fight for racial justice in America.

48 pages, Paperback

Published March 9, 2021

Reviews

[Alan (the Lone Librarian) Teder · Rating 5 out of 5]

MoMA One on One
Review of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) paperback edition (2021)

Robert Frank: Trolley - New Orleans is one of an ongoing series of monographs published by the Museum of Modern Art, each of which focuses on a single art work in its collection. There are only a few of them listed on Goodreads (as of June 2021), but there are 15 of them available through the MoMA Store.


2nd edition cover for Robert Frank's The Americans (1959) showing the full landscape framing of "Trolley - New Orleans", image sourced from Wikipedia.

Lucy Gallun's essay examines Robert Frank's Trolley, New Orleans photo in the context of segregation of races in the Southern States of the USA in that era. Frank's photo shows the racial separation starkly with the white faces sitting in the front of the trolley to the left and the black faces sitting in the back of the trolley to the right. Frank's photographs in his now iconic collection The Americans (Grove Press, 1959) were allowed to speak for themselves without commentary, aside from the basic labelling of the site and geographic location. The overall portrayal of America was seen as too negative to be published initially in the U.S. and the book first saw print as Les Américains (1958) in France.

I read Robert Frank: Trolley, New Orleans due to my discovery of the MoMA One on One series from reading Dorothea Lange: Migrant Mother (2019).

[Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great analysis of Frank’s work, a god in my Pantheon of artists, centred around segregation and how photography impacted the American civil rights movement. Books like this remind me why I love this medium so much.

[Stefana_Daniela · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really loved reading this, how Robert Frank's Trolley photograph made an impact in the civil rights movement and showed the injustice in America of 1950s. The book really explains what determined Frank to take that shot, including the social and political context in which he made it alongside other references to other photographers, whose work made an impact during those times.