Seminal Swiss-born photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank, whose artistic vision served as a seven-decade-long journey through the American vernacular landscape. After studying photography and graphic design in Switzerland, Frank moved to New York City in 1947. He soon earned commercial assignments for magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar, and befriended artists and poets including Peter Orlovsky, Allen Ginsberg, Walker Evans, Jonas Mekas, and Willem de Kooning. His first photography book, published originally in France as Les Americains (The Americans, 1958), would become a defining document of the postwar United States—a rambling essay in black-and-white whose gritty portrayals of American culture, including its racial and class disparities, pushed against the country’s conformism. Soon after The Americans, Frank shifted his focus to film, and codirected his first feature, Pull My Daisy, with painter Alfred Leslie in 1959.