Wilshire Center

Before he took up film making in the 1970s, Swiss photographer Robert Frank toured the States capturing the grittiness of the 1950s blue collar continent. With an outsider’s clarity of vision his stark gray images captured sullen people and their hard surroundings and told stories of a nation.

Work he did in Europe as well as America is a strong testament to the fact Frank could make one image speak volumes. And the subject was always fascinatingly true, whether it was the huddled salesmen in the 1955 “Cadillac Showroom” that look like Mafia hit men or the couple delightedly steering a bumper car with their eyes squeezed shut. He caught the ironic beauty of tulips sold out of a suitcase in Paris and the mentality of segregation on a streetcar in New Orleans. Frank’s subjects are human, always a complex but succinct composite of ideology and events. At least that’s the way the artist made them appear--as living symbols of a nation and an age. (Jan Kesner Gallery, 164 N. La Brea Ave., to Nov. 25.)