In 1955, the Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank received a Guggenheim Fellowship to travel across the United States and take pictures of what he saw. He embarked on a series of road trips, accompanied at times by his wife Mary Lockspeiser and their two children, documenting American life from an outsider’s perspective. The photographs were compiled in his seminal photobook The Americans, a highly influential portrait of postwar America. Jack Kerouac, whom Frank met outside a party in New York City, wrote the introduction to the U.S. edition. To celebrate the centennial of the artist’s birth, Boston MFA takes a closer look at Frank’s personal life and early career, centering around a scrapbook of photographs he created for his first wife, Mary, in 1949. The scrapbook contains images of lone figures and empty streets, shot with the signature poetic slant soon to appear in The Americans, alongside handwritten notes for Mary. —Paulina Prosnitz