While on his cross-country trip sponsored by Guggenheim Fellowship, Frank spent nearly three months in Los Angeles, from late 1955 to early 1956. As Sarah Greenough's notes in her essay 'Disordering the Senses: Guggenheim Fellowship' in Robert Frank's The Americans, his focus was becoming increasingly reglious during this time:

'Recalling his photograph of a statue of St. Francis holding a cross and a Bible near a Los Angeles courthouse, he noted that he was attracted to the forlorn, isolated saint both because he seemed to be preaching to a bleak urban vista of gas stations and cars and because someone had placed a small vase of flowers at his feet. The contrast between the "big, grey block of cement in the background" and the personal tenderness of the flowers was what moved him, just as he had been touched by the religious fevor of a Jehovah's Witness who devoted his life to standing on the street selling his religion through cheap pamphlets' (Greenough, Robert Frank's The Americans, p. 129, with a quote by Robert Frank from Documentary Photography, Time-Life books, Alexandria, 1983, p. 160).