Mississippi River, Baton Rouge, Louisiana

Robert Frank

1955 · Gelatin silver print · Photographs

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."

Artist

Robert Frank

Date

1955

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Gift of Barbara Schwartz, 2018