Robert Frank: The Americans

artbook

Regular price $40.00

Kerouac said, “Robert Frank…he sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film, taking rank among the tragic poets of the world.”

First published in France in 1958, then in the United States in 1959, Robert Frank's The Americans changed the course of 20th-century photography

First published in France in 1958, then in the United States in 1959, Robert Frank's The Americans changed the course of twentieth-century photography. In 83 photographs, Frank looked beneath the surface of American life to reveal a people plagued by racism, ill-served by their politicians and rendered numb by a rapidly expanding culture of consumption. Yet he also found novel areas of beauty in simple, overlooked corners of American life. And it was not just Frank's subject matter--cars, jukeboxes and even the road itself―that redefined the icons of America; it was also his seemingly intuitive, immediate, off-kilter style, as well as his method of brilliantly linking his photographs together thematically, conceptually, formally and linguistically, that made The Americans so innovative. More of an ode or a poem than a literal document, the book is as powerful and provocative today as it was 56 years ago.
The Americans
By Robert Frank
Introduction by Jack Kerouac
180 pages, 83 tritone plates
20.9 cm x 18.4 cm
Hardcover with a dust jacket
Steidl / National Gallery of Art
ISBN: 978-3-86521-584-0
Publication date: May 2008