Author(s) | Robert Frank

Publisher | Steidl; Germany, 2008

Language(s) | English

Paperback | 180 pages

Dimensions | 18.4 x 20.9 cm

ISBN | 978-3-86521-584-0

Photography | Creatives duMonde

Author | Robert Frank

Oeuvre | Photographer and documentary filmmaker. Published nineteen books and produced twenty films.

Swiss photographer Robert Frank obtained a grant in 1955 from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to chronicle what he saw while traveling across the United States. In 1958, French publisher Robert Delpire* produced a first edition – Les Américains – of eighty-three photographs. Grove Press** printed the first American edition the following year. Critics have since written of the collective shock, awe and reverence inspired by his spontaneous, casual and incisive telling of a country’s character: its wounds, triumphs and invisible lines that define, bind and divide by color, class, politics, corruption and estrangement. The Americans sealed Frank’s place in the 20th century canon of consequential photographers. His work marked a turning point as to what the medium could signify and became a landmark in the history of art.

Since its first printing, critics have mined for layers of meaning in each photograph. Likewise, Frank’s intent – as a foreign interlocutor – and approach to his host country, including its landscapes, peoples, socio-cultural and economic stratification have prompted praise, rebuke and condemnation. To have a productive discussion about history, all participants must agree on the same facts, granting that interpretations of said facts may vary. Frank gifted us the same facts. His images reveal a past that cannot be untold. They tug at the strings of America’s present which, one could argue, often resembles what he captured in his sojourns across forty-eight states seventy years ago; they tease us about its current, fragile dance with stability and unraveling. As a historio-cultural hallmark, The Americans elicits niggling questions about the future of a global hegemon.

Introduction by Jack Kerouac, ©1959.

TMG

Notes |

*Paris: Delpire, 1958. French. Includes text in French by Simone de Beauvoir, Erskine Caldwell, William Faulkner, Henry Miller and John Steinbeck about American political and social history, selected by Alain Bosquet. Part of the Encyclopédie Essentielle series.

**New York: Grove Press, 1959. English. Introduction by Jack Kerouac.