London (Belsize Crescent), 1951-52

This haunting evocation of a girl running down a London street, away from a gaping hearse door that frames a garbage collector quietly making his rounds like the grim reaper, is one of the most important images that Robert Frank made before The Americans. The present lot was printed in the early to mid-1960s and mounted on crescent board as an exhibition print. Sol Mednick, a photographer and teacher at the Philadelphia College of Art, donated this print to the institution in 1966 which in 1983 deaccessioned it.