Robert Frank: Trolley - New Orleans, by Lucy Gallun

I’m a member of Museum of Modern Art, and I try to visit at least once a month. Truthfully, I spend almost as much time in the gift shop as I do in the galleries, mainly because MoMA has an excellent photography section, and I am apparently incapable of leaving without buying at least one more photography book that I absolutely do not need.

On a recent visit, I spotted a slim little 48-page monograph devoted entirely to one photograph: Robert Frank: Trolley – New Orleans by Lucy Gallun. As a longtime admirer of Robert Frank and his landmark photobook The Americans, I picked it up immediately.

The photograph itself is instantly recognizable. Taken in 1955 during Frank’s cross-country Guggenheim-funded road trip through America, Trolley – New Orleans captures the passengers of a passing streetcar divided by race under Jim Crow segregation: white riders seated toward the front, Black riders relegated to the rear. It’s one of those images that looks deceptively simple until you really sit with it and look. Then it becomes impossible to forget.

What surprised me most about this little book was how much I enjoyed reading it. Photography books are often heavy on images and light on insight, but Gallun’s essay is terrific: clear, intelligent, historically rich, and completely accessible without ever talking down to the reader. In remarkably economical prose, she traces the circumstances surrounding the image, Frank’s journey across America, the evolution of The Americans, and the political climate that shaped both the work and the reaction to it.

One particularly fascinating section recounts Frank’s arrest in Arkansas in 1955. Police officers, suspicious of his accent, cameras, and papers written in foreign languages, detained him on suspicion of espionage. Frank later described it as “the most humiliating experience I had so far.” The incident profoundly affected him, sharpening his understanding of prejudice in America and, arguably, changing the emotional tenor of the photographs he made afterward. By the time he photographed the New Orleans trolley, he knew exactly what he was looking at.

Peppered throughout the text are additional photographs and historical references that deepen the discussion of photography’s role in documenting and influencing the civil rights movement. For such a compact little volume, it contains an astonishing amount of insight.

Books like this remind me why I fell in love with photography in the first place. Not just because photographs can be beautiful, but because they can quietly hold history, politics, injustice, and humanity all at once.