Mississippi River, Baton Rouge, Louisiana
Robert Frank American, born Switzerland
Not on view
This view of a preacher conducting a baptism in the Mississippi River shows a man kneeling and holding a large cross in one hand, a tambourine in the other. It is a superb example from Frank’s Beat-inflected, two-year road trip from New York to California and back again. The dramatic composition, with its tilted frame, was shocking in its era, and it is one of the photographs that caught the eye of the poet Jack Kerouac: "[Frank is] always taking pictures of . . . intermediary mysteries like the Negro priest squatting underneath the bright liquid belly mer of the Mississippi at Baton Rouge for some reason at dusk or early dawn with a white snowy cross and secret incantations never known outside the bayou."
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