Photographs that invite a deeper look at people, places, the past, and perception.
Xiomaro’s Penn Station was selected by Crista Dix, Executive Director and Curator of the Griffin Museum of Photography, for exhibition in Homage | The Americans. The exhibition is part of the museum’s State of Our Union series of events paying tribute to Robert Frank and his 1958 photographic book, The Americans.
Photographers everywhere were invited to contribute new work in direct homage to Frank and his groundbreaking photography. “We settled on 83 incredible photographs to mirror the original photobook,” explains Dix, “making my job so difficult and exciting all at the same time.”
Like Frank, Xiomaro notes that he looks “at America through ordinary people and unguarded moments rather than symbols.” Penn Station, he explains, reflects Frank’s influence “in its crowded setting, cropped figures, direct gaze, and ambiguous human interaction. I was drawn to the woman’s expression because it resists explanation: she seems present and apart from the scene.” As in Frank’s work, “I trust such fleeting encounters and let everyday life reveal something about America without forcing a conclusion.” The photograph is one of 160 appearing in Xiomaro’s book, Street Photography of New York City: Street Haunting in the Big Apple (Sutton Publishing, 2025).
Dix notes that, in 1958, Robert Frank crossed the country with a camera, and came back with a book that changed the way America saw itself. The Americans was controversial and unflattering, a stark look at who we were in postwar America. It was a mirror that we didn’t know we needed to look into, unresolved, and unmistakably true. Frank chronicled the postwar United States in diners and gas stations, funerals and flags, jukeboxes and segregated buses, and in doing so gave us a new visual language for looking at our fellow citizens: as a people caught in the middle of an unfinished story.
The online exhibition places Frank’s original vision in dialogue with photographers working today who have inherited his instinct — the drive to look past the myth of the country and toward its lived reality. Their images carry forward Frank’s willingness to look honestly, his eye for the overlooked corner and the unguarded face, and his belief that a nation is best understood not through its monuments but through its people. Frank’s America was restless, contradictory, and filled with compassion — and so is ours.
All photographs are available for exhibition and purchase. Contact Xiomaro
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