Restaurant – U.S. 1 leaving Columbia, South Carolina
Robert Frank American, born Switzerland
Not on view
This study of a roadside cafe in South Carolina features Oral Roberts, the famous American televangelist, preaching the Gospel on television to an otherwise empty room. It is one of eighty-three photographs in The Americans (1958), Robert Frank’s landmark book that directly explored the many anxieties lurking beneath the country’s seeming prosperity ten years after the end of the Great Depression and World War II. Frank focused his camera on racial segregation, on the developing hostility between the youth culture and the status quo, on rural loneliness and urban angst, and, as shown here, on the many cultural changes wrought by the nascent television culture.
This image cannot be enlarged, viewed at full screen, or downloaded.
