Robert Frank, considered one of the pre-eminent living photographers, was born in Switzerland in 1924 and emigrated to the U.S. in 1946. He got a job as a fashion photographer, but soon began traveling around the world to take pictures of different people and cultures.

In 1955, he obtained a $3,000 grant from the Guggenheim Foundation to travel America, taking pictures. Using a 1950 Ford Coupe and a 35 mm Leica camera, Frank traveled part of the way with his family, starting in New York, down the Eastern Seaboard, through the Deep South and west through the desert to Los Angeles, before turning north along the Rockies and across the Great Plains.

His odyssey ended in Indianapolis in June 1957 with more than 28,000 photographic negatives. Those were culled to 83 photographs and published in Paris in 1958 as "Les Americains."

The U.S. version was published the next year with a new foreword by Jack Kerouac, whom Frank had met shortly after completing his journey.

"The Americans" initially suffered low sales and harsh criticism for its bleak portrayal of American life.

In 1959, Frank directed the film "Pull My Daisy," starring Allen Ginsberg and most of the rest of the Beat figures, and written and narrated by Kerouac.

Frank spent the next dozen years or so primarily as a filmmaker, interrupted by a lawsuit filed by the Rolling Stones over a 1972 documentary he had shot chronicling their drug- and sex-crazed tour. The Stones were successful in preventing the film's release.

In the 1970s, he returned to still photography, which took on a much more personal and autobiographical nature, driven by the 1974 death of his daughter in a plane crash, and his son's diagnosis of schizophrenia; his son died in 1994.

Frank accepted occasional jobs like directing music videos (Patti Smith's "Summer Cannibals") and photographing the 1984 Democratic Convention. In 1996, he received the prestigious Hasselblad Award for photography. Other books by Frank include "The Lines of My Hand," "New York to Nova Scotia" and "Moving Out."