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Trip to Florida with Jack Kerouac, New York

Robert Frank American, born Switzerland

Not on view

Robert Frank met the writer Jack Kerouac in September 1957 soon after Kerouac published On the Road, the quintessential Beat Generation novel. A year later they drove to Florida to retrieve Kerouac’s favorite typewriter, his cats, and a big suitcase full of original manuscripts from his mother’s house. Frank made pictures along the way, including this rare view from the driver’s seat of a rainy roadway bridge crossing from Maryland into Virginia. Kerouac commented on Frank’s capacity to drive and simultaneously make pictures: "I suddenly realized I was taking a trip with a genuine artist and that he was expressing himself in an art-form that was not unlike my own and yet fraught with a thousand difficulties quite unlike those of my own."

Trip to Florida with Jack Kerouac, New York, Robert Frank (American (born Switzerland), Zurich 1924–2019 Inverness, Nova Scotia), Gelatin silver print

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