Assembly line -- Detroit, 1955

In July 1955 Robert Frank wrote in a letter to his wife from Detroit: 'Ford is an absolutely fantastic place. Every factory is really the same but this one is God's factory and if there is such a thing--I am sure that the devil gave him a helping hand to build up what is called Ford's River Rouge Plant. But all the cars come out at one end... At the other end, the beginning of the Plant, ships bring Iron- ore and from then on the whole car is built.' (Tucker and Brookman, eds., Robert Frank: New York to Nova Scotia, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1986, p. 22.) It was the largest such self-contained complex in the world where raw materials were transformed into one car per minute. It was the peak year of its production and there were more than 180,000 visitors that year, an all time record.

Detroit was one of Frank's first and most important short trips before his legendary trans-continental journey that resulted in his seminal book The Americans. Of the 83 pictures in the book, nine were made in Detroit including the present lot of the assembly line at the River Rouge plant. In a rare, but not unique, substitution Frank replaced the present image with a more sharply focused variant image in the 1978 edition and all subsequent editions of The Americans. But the present lot, included in the first edition through the 1968-69 editions, is the more radical, blurry and grainy image that helped establish his reputation and influenced generations of photographers, writers and artists.