| ROBERT FRANKRobert Frank virtually founded the contemporary photobook with his 1958 classic The Americans. Born in Switzerland in 1924, he migrated to the U.S. in 1947, quickly securing employment as a photographer for Harper’s Bazaar and participating in the seminal Museum of Modern Art show 51 American Photographers in 1950. By the time The Americans was published (to an initially skeptical reception), Frank had moved on to film, producing the classic of Beat cinema Pull My Daisy (1959), narrated by Jack Kerouac, as well as Conversations in Vermont (1969) and Cocksucker Blues (1972), a commissioned documentary of a Rolling Stones tour that the band later deemed too explicit to screen. That same year he published his second photobook, The Lines of My Hand, a visual autobiography of sorts, which heralded his embrace of a collaged narrative that incorporated multiple image frames and text. All of Frank’s books are meticulously conceived and crafted, and he can truly be said to be a photographer who “thinks in book form."VIEW OTHER FEATURED PHOTOGRAPHERSJoel MeyerowitzEikoh HosoePeter BialobrzeskiCandida HöferJoel MeyerowitzMiroslav TichyLee FriedlanderPhotography Monographs, Exhibition Catalogs, Surveys
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| | | Robert Frank | | | "A wife can stop loving you: photography? I loved it, spent my talents on it, I was committed to it; but when respectability and success became a part of it, then it was time to look for another mistress or wife." | | |
| | FEATURED TITLERobert Frank: Black, White and Things
Inscribed with the quote, “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly / what is essential is invisible to the eye,” by writer and pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Robert Frank's handcrafted 1952 book, Black White and Things, was made in an edition of three identical copies designed by Werner Zryd, each with a spiral binding containing original photographs of Frank's travels to cities including Paris, New York, Valencia and St. Louis. First reprinted for an exhibition at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., in 1994, this edition has now been designed in a smaller format by Frank. The three categories “black,” “white” and “things,” are shaped more by mood than subject matter: vastly different images—Frank's first wife reclining with their newborn baby, peasants squatting against a flaking wall in Peru and a business man strolling past a snow-filled tree in London—are all gathered in the “white” section, for example.
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LIST PRICE: U.S. $29.95
ISBN: 9783865218087
FORMAT: Pbk, 7.75 x 8 in. / 39 pgs / 37 tritone.
PUBLISHER: Steidl/The Robert Frank Project
PUBLICATION DATE: 1/31/2010 | Active
DISTRIBUTION: | RETAILER DISC: TRADE | |
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FEATURED TITLERobert Frank: Hold Still, Keep GoingEdited by Ute Eskildsen. Text by Ute Eskildsen, Christoph Ribbat, Wolfgang Beilenhoff. Interview by Ute Eskildsen.
Originally published to coincide with Robert Frank's exhibition HOLD STILL_keep going at Germany's Museum Folkwang, Essen, in 2001, this book explores the filmic aspects of Frank's photography. The interaction between the still and moving image permeates Frank's oeuvre, from his early still photographs, to his concentration on filmmaking in the 1960s and his use of both thereafter. Adopting a non-chronological approach that juxtaposes work from a career spanning more than 60 years, this volume collects prints, film stills and collages, as well as sequences of still photography arranged like fragments from films. Frank's use of text is also crucial, both in his films (in the form of scripted and improvised dialogue), and through words handwritten on the photographs. | |  |
LIST PRICE: U.S. $59.95
ISBN: 9783865218124
FORMAT: Hbk, 8 x 10.5 in. / 168 pgs / illustrated throughout.
PUBLISHER: Steidl/The Robert Frank Project
PUBLICATION DATE: 3/31/2010 | Forthcoming
DISTRIBUTION: | RETAILER DISC: TRADE | |
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FEATURED TITLERobert Frank: The Complete Film Works Volume 5
Housed in a slipcase-enclosed metal film can, this latest three-DVD installment in Steidl's edition of Robert Frank's complete films presents movies from the 1980s. 1983's This Song for Jack documents a conference held at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, honoring the memory of Frank's friend Jack Kerouac, and includes footage of a moving, rain-soaked reading of On the Road by a number of Kerouac's contemporaries and admirers. A more atypical Frank film collected here is 1989's Hunter, shot on location in Germany's industrial Ruhr region, and which is, in Frank's words, “about a man whose destiny is—not to find a destination… A man who fears that he will never find what his imagination compels him to look for, a mystical traveler going by train and by car through... language and landscape.”
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LIST PRICE: U.S. $125.00
ISBN: 9783869300436
FORMAT: Boxed set of 3 DVDs (PAL & NTSC), 5 x 8.25 in.
PUBLISHER: Steidl
PUBLICATION DATE: 5/31/2010 | Forthcoming
DISTRIBUTION: | RETAILER DISC: TRADE | |
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FEATURED TITLERobert Frank: The Complete Film Works Volume 6
The sixth volume of Robert Frank's films and videos includes 1990's C'est vrai (One Hour), a single-take account of Frank and actor Kevin O'Connor either walking or riding in the back of a minivan through Manhattan's Lower East Side. C'est vrai captures both the intimacy and the swift pace of pre-gentrification street life on the Lower East Side. Candy Mountain, from 1987, is also a film about traveling, though on a grander scale, and about music: Julius (Kevin J. O'Connor) learns of a legendary guitar maker named Elmore Silk, and sets off in search of him. Finally, Run/New Order, released in 1989, is the four-minute video for New Order's “Run” single, which intersperses live footage of the band with New York street scenes that seem to slip in and out of sync with the song. As with the previous installments in this series, this volume comes in a metal film can housed in a slipcase.
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LIST PRICE: U.S. $125.00
ISBN: 9783869300443
FORMAT: Boxed set of 3 DVDs (PAL & NTSC), 5 x 8.25 in.
PUBLISHER: Steidl
PUBLICATION DATE: 5/31/2010 | Forthcoming
DISTRIBUTION: | RETAILER DISC: TRADE | |
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| FEATURED TITLERobert Frank: The AmericansIntroduction by Jack Kerouac.
In 1958, the first edition of Robert Frank's The Americans was published in Paris. Les Américains contained Frank's 83 photographs in the same sequence as all subsequent editions, with the image on the right hand page, but juxtaposed with historical texts about American society and politics, gathered by Alain Bosquet. The following year, in the first American edition, the French texts were removed and an introduction by Jack Kerouac was added. Over the subsequent 50 years, The Americans has been republished in many editions, in numerous languages, with a variety of cover designs and even in a range of sizes. It is the most famous photography book ever published, and it changed the face of the medium forever.
Robert Frank discussed with his publisher, Gerhard Steidl, the idea of producing a new edition using modern scanning and the finest tritone printing. The starting point was to bring original prints from New York to Göttingen, Germany, where Steidl is based.
In July 2007, Frank visited Göttingen. A new format for the book was worked out and new typography selected. A new cover was designed and Frank chose the book cloth, foil for embossing and the endpaper. Most significantly, as he has done for every edition of The Americans, Frank changed the cropping of many of the photographs, usually including more information. Two images were changed completely from the original 1958 and 1959 editions. | |  |
LIST PRICE: U.S. $39.95
ISBN: 9783865215840
FORMAT: Hardback, 8.25 x 7.25 in. / 180 pgs / 83 tritone.
PUBLISHER: Steidl/National Gallery of Art, Washington
PUBLICATION DATE: 5/15/2008 | Active
DISTRIBUTION: | RETAILER DISC: TRADE | |
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| VISUAL BOOK INDEX | ROBERT FRANK |
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