Robert Frank photo

Regarding Robert Frank's photo depicting a black woman standing against the outside of a building holding a baby, taken from his anthology, The Americans, I have to say that there are many ways it could be interpreted. Starting with Bordwell and Thompson, interpretation of this picture could begin by comparing and contrasting it with Frank's other works. In doing that, you could look for motifs. Having seen other works of his, I know that this has the motif of people in it with them and their foreground in the focus and their background out of focus so as to emphasize them and where they are. Another way of comparing it using Bordwell and Thompson would be to summarize the work using the four different meanings, referential, explicit, implicit and symptomatic. A referential meaning could read as follows: in 1950s urban America, a sidewalk is empty except for a 30-ish looking black woman who is nurturing a white baby. Skipping to the implicit meaning, the meaning could be extended to talking about how the otherwise empty sidewalk could be said to imply that the two were isolated since, in that era, bi-racial relations were not looked well upon.

Now, moving on to how Sturken and Cartwright would interpret it, here might be a place where a survey of many people's interpretations would come in handy since their book, Practices of Looking, emphasizes the idea that meaning consists of what viewers take away from a work. Also, it would be appropriate to look at the aesthetics of other works from this time period as well as from Frank's other works. In addition to that, it would also be appropriate to look at photography before and after Frank, who had a great influence on photography.

To close, I should say that, for my interpretation of this photo, I would be much more inclined to go with Bordwell and Thompson's method of looking at it in the context of Frank's other works as well as that of the era in which this photo was taken. So, for my interpretation, I believe that this photo is speaking about how, at that time (the '50s), bi-racial relationships were frowned upon but, despite that, those in them persisted.