Yom Kippur, East River, New York City

Robert Frank

1955

Photograph of men in hats and suits and one boy in skullcap outside with their backs turned away from the camera, looking toward the river.

Though this photograph of Orthodox Jews at the East River has long been captioned as having been taken on Yom Kippur, it is much more likely that it was taken on the first afternoon of Rosh Hashanah, when the ritual of tashlikh (a symbolic casting of sins into a body of water) is performed. Robert Frank took this photograph as part of his road trip across the United States in the 1950s, taking pictures of people and places that did not fit neatly into the idea of “the American dream.” In 1959, he published these photographs in a landmark book, The Americans.

Credits

© Robert Frank from The Americans.

Published in: The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 9.

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Creator Bio

Robert Frank

1924–2019

Swiss-born Robert Frank made some of the most influential contributions to twentieth-century American photography with his candid, unvarnished images of everyday citizens. Frank worked as a commercial photographer at the outset of his career, taking photographs for magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, and Life. After receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1955, he spent the next two years driving across the United States and capturing what he saw as naturalized American culture. A selection of these photos were published in his 1957 photo book, The Americans, and offered a stark contrast to the prevailing image of an idealized postwar America. In 1959, Frank began exploring avant-garde filmmaking and continued to work in both film and photography.

Related Guide

Visual and Material Culture in the Mid-Twentieth Century

1939–1973

Jewish visual art flourished and diversified in the postwar period, reflecting the social and political transformations taking place in the world.

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