MFA Boston acquires 38 photographs by Robert Frank capturing life in 1940s Paris

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), has acquired 38 photographs by the influential photographer Robert Frank (1924-2019) known for his 1958 book The Americans. The acquisition comprises 34 photographs donated by the June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation and an additional four works purchased with funds given by John Reed, the former chief executive of Citibank, and his wife Cynthia.

The images, made in 1949, show glimpses of Paris such as a group of children watching a blind street singer with an accordion; another picture depicts a trolley car emblazoned with the word “circus” on the side. The photographs were taken when Swiss-born Frank returned to Europe following two years in New York.

The photos acquired by the MFA are on show in the exhibition Robert Frank: Mary’s Book (until 22 June 2025) which explores the personal scrapbook of photographs Frank made for Mary Lockspeiser, his first wife. “Created in 1949, the one-of-a-kind, handmade book [Mary’s Book] represents a formative moment in Frank’s career, when he experimented with juxtaposing images and text,” says a museum statement.

The Americans by Frank—an unfiltered take on the politics and people of the United States—was a hugely influential ensemble of photographs of his adoptive compatriots. In our obituary, we reported that Frank’s impact on photography was as broad as it was inescapable. “If there was a sea of photography, he was the anchor that everybody wanted to tether to,” said the photographer and filmmaker Stephen Wilkes, “He was an innovator, he had such a vision. I, myself, I used the carry around The Americans like it was a Bible.”

The Financial Times says that The Americans was “the rare photography book that became an instant classic, a nuanced riff on American failure at the height of the cold war… but Frank came to despise his pictures’ eloquence and beauty, and worried that their success had become a trap. He felt doomed to spend the rest of his life rehashing The Americans”. The MFA has also acquired the photo 4th of July, Jay, New York (1954) which featured in The Americans (the acquisition was supported by the Horace W. Goldsmith Fund for Photography, among others).

An exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Robert Frank’s Scrapbook Footage (until spring 2025), includes footage dating from 1970 to 2006 knitted together in a moving-image scrapbook. “The footage in this installation, stitched together by [editor] Laura Israel and [art director] Alex Bingham to evoke his restless gaze and voice, sheds new light on his artistic process—at once comical and melancholy,” says a museum statement. The films show family, friends, and collaborators, as well as domestic interiors and vistas of cities and coastlines.