FRANK, Robert.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Les Américains. First edition, first printing, of Robert Frank's masterpiece, in which his photographs are accompanied by text by authors such as Simone de Beauvoir, Erskine Caldwell, William Faulkner, Henry Miller, and John Steinbeck.Frank's work "has become so much the photobook of legend in its first American edition that it is often forgotten that Delpire's original Paris edition was a different book. Its accompanying texts, gathered by Alain Bosquet, placed it more in a socio-documentary context - with a politically antagonistic, even anti-American point of view. What has made this arguably the most renowned photobook of all? Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, the majority of the pictures are instantly memorable, 'dry, lean, and transparent,' as John Szarkowski has said of them, yet also weighty and profound, even heartstopping. Secondly, there is the sequencing... Ideas ebb and flow, are introduced, discarded, recapitulated, transfigured, transposed, played off and piled up against each other with the exuberant energy of a Charlie Parker saxophone solo" (Parr & Badger).

• Printing: first

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