Funeral—St. Helena, South Carolina

“There is one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment. This kind of photography is realism. Bur realism is not enough—there has to be vision and the two together can make a good photograph. It is difficult to describe this thin line where matter ends and mind begins.”

-Robert Frank, 1962

In 1955, Robert Frank began exploring the United States on a Guggenheim Fellowship and took 28,000 photographs along the way. A selection of these photographs was printed in his 1958 book, The Americans, which became one of the most influential photographic books of the century. In his introduction to the 1959 American edition of the book, the poet Jack Kerouac describes, “The humor, the sadness, the EVERYTHING-ness and American-ness of these pictures!” Frank used a 35-mm Leica camera to take his pictures quickly and secretly, which gave his photographs an unpremeditated and unguarded appearance. This image was one of just a handful of frames that Frank exposed at a funeral in St. Helena, South Carolina.