THE AMERICANS
Robert Frank
Robert Frank, Jack Kerouac (Introduction): THE AMERICANS. NYC: Aperture (a Museum of Modern Art Edition in association with Grossman) 1968. First revised and enlarged edition. A very good to near-fine softcover Book in stiff wrappers: the lower corner has been gently bumped. Former owners ink ownership stamp inside front cover, otherwise interior unmarked and very clean. A very desireable copy of the Museum of Modern Art edition of Frank's masterwork which was enlarged in this edition to include film strips from his 1960's films which represented a continuation of his work. This edition is way out-of-print. 8 x 7.25 softcover book that includes the contents of the 1959 Grove Press edition, as well as a Robert Frank filmography of his motion pictures along with credits, a film synopsis and a contact sheet of several frames from each film. Robert Frank established a new iconography for contemporary America, comprised of bits of bus depots, lunch counters, strip developments, empty spaces, cars, and unknowable faces. This iconography has become a common coin and here in the originals the acuity of Frank's own sensibility is alive and relevant.
A nice tight copy of the second American appearance of photographer Robert Frank's now seminal book. This revised American edition includes the introduction by Jack Kerouac which was not included in the true first edition of the book, "Les Amercains", published in 1958 by Robert Delpire in Paris. Additionally, this edition is superior to the printings which followed of this book due to the gorgeous, Stonetone Lithographic reproductions of Frank's classic images. Also this edition includes for the first time the"Continuation" at the rear of the book which includes a Robert Frank filmography of his motion pictures along with credits, a film synopsis and a contact sheet of several frames from each film.
"Frank first wanted William Faulkner to write the introduction; then [Walker] Evans agreed to do it. But Frank's old friend Robert Delpire in Paris thought it needed a different approach, and the French and American editions of this classic turned out to be two very different books. The Delpire first edition ... is more like a sociological study, wherein Frankšs photographs appear as illustrations of the probing texts printed on facing pages, gathered by Alain Bosquet from dozens of illustrious writers. When Barney Rosset at Grove Press agreed to publish The Americans in the U.S., Frank pulled out all the text, leaving only blank pages with captions facing the images, mirroring the layout of Evans' American Photographs. To replace all the words in the French edition, Frank includes only Jack Kerouac's bop intro" (Roth).
"...paved the way for three decades of photographs exploring the personal poetics of lived experience. Many memorable photobooks have been derived from this mass of material. None has been more memorable, more influential, nor more fully realized than Franks's masterpiece." ( Parr and Badger).
"It was Frank's The Americans that made the photographic book into an artform in its own right. Frank was following a lead set by Morris' book [The Inhabitants] and, especially, by Evans' American Photographs, both of which are designed to let pictures play off each other in a way that controls and reinforces their effect on the viewer. Even Klein's New York book displays this tendency. But Frank's goes much further, creating a denser, richer, deeper structure of images than any book before it." (Colin Westerbeck in Michel Frizot, et. al., The New History of Photography)
out of stock