This year, acclaimed photographer Robert Frank received the 43rd Edward MacDowell Medal on August 18, 2002, at the Colony. Philip Brookman, senior curator of photography and media arts at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., presented the Medal to Mr. Frank in a ceremony beginning at 12:15 p.m. Open studios of all MacDowell Fellows currently in residence followed.

Mr. Frank's work has been lauded for revealing profound tensions between the various strata of American society — rich and poor, black and white, North and South — in order to define the American experience. “He looked at America critically in the 1950s when the United States was very proud of itself, when we were post-war, emergent, victorious, self-satisfied, and he captured the psychic barenness,” says Sandra S. Phillips, chairman of this year's Medal Selection Committee and the senior curator of photography for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. “And he didn't only capture the streets of the main cities; he drove across the country and reflected it. He's simply the most influential photographer of the period, and I can't think of anyone else more important.”

Among Mr. Frank's publications is The Americans, a visionary work that has been reprinted nine times. In the introduction to the book, Jack Kerouac wrote: “Robert Frank, Swiss, unobtrusive, nice, with that little camera that he raises and snaps, with one hand he sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film, taking rank among the tragic poets of the world.”