Edited by Gerhard Steidl. Text by John Farrel, Gerhard Steidl, Monte Packham. Interview between Robert Frank, Robert Enright, Meeka Walsh. Interview between Gerhard Steidl, Fritz Göttler.
The bookmaker photographer: 30 years of Robert Frank’s collaborations with Steidl
Hbk, 8.25 x 11.75 in. / 120 pgs / 4 color / 75 bw. | 11/10/2020 | In stock $30.00
"War is over; the heroic French population reaffirms superiority. Love, Paris, and Flowers … but London was black, white, and gray, the elegance, the style, all present in front of always changing fog. Then I met a man from Wales talking about the Miners and I had read How Green Was My Valley. This became my only try to make a 'Story.'" —Robert Frank
Hbk, 8 x 9.75 in. / 128 pgs / 70 bw. | 6/18/2019 | In stock $45.00
After The Americans, The Lines of My Hand is arguably Robert Frank’s most important book, and without doubt the publication that established his autobiographical, sometimes confessional, approach to bookmaking.
Pbk, 9 x 12 in. / 102 pgs / 160 bw. | 2/27/2018 | Out of stock $35.00
Leon of Juda is the seventh book in Robert Frank’s (born 1924) acclaimed series of visual diaries, which combine iconic photos from throughout his career with the more personal pictures he makes today.
Slip, pbk, 8 x 9.75 in. / 52 pgs / 10 color / 33 bw. | 11/21/2017 | In stock $30.00
Edited with text by Sarah Greenough. Text by Anne Wilkes Tucker, Stuart Alexander, Martin Gasser, Jeff Rosenheim, Michel Frizot, Luc Sante, Philip Brookman.
Hbk, 9.25 x 11.5 in. / 528 pgs / 108 color / 210 duotone / 168 tritone. | 1/1/2009 | Out of stock $90.00
SOLD OUT. Thursday, January 28, 2016, from 6-8PM, NYU's Tisch School of the Arts presents legendary photographer Robert Frank in conversation with master printer and publisher Gerhard Steidl. This historic conversation initiates the exhibition 'Robert Frank: Books and Films, 1947-2016.'
Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Text by Lucy Gallun.
In the midst of an extended road trip across the United States, Robert Frank turned from bustling Canal Street, New Orleans, where crowds of people swarmed the sidewalks, pointed his camera lens at a passing trolley, and clicked the shutter. That single exposure produced a picture with enduring clarity: a row of windows framing the street car’s passengers—white passengers in the front, black passengers in the back.
Frank captured individual faces gazing from each rectangular frame, from the weary Black man in his work shirt to the young white girl just in front of him, her hand resting on the wooden sign that designated areas segregated by race. In 1958, he wrote: “With these photographs, I have attempted to show a cross-section of the American population. My effort was to express it simply and without confusion.” By the time The Americans was published in the United States in 1959, with this image now appearing on its front cover, New Orleans streetcars and buses had been desegregated through a 1958 court order. But Jim Crow was still in full swing, the 1960s Civil Rights struggles still ahead. An essay by MoMA curator Lucy Gallun conveys how this image reverberates in new contexts today.
Published by Steidl. Edited by Gerhard Steidl. Text by John Farrel, Gerhard Steidl, Monte Packham. Interview between Robert Frank, Robert Enright, Meeka Walsh. Interview between Gerhard Steidl, Fritz Göttler.
Exploring Robert Frank’s rich bookmaking history with Steidl, and featuring spreads and explanatory texts from the more than 30 books that Frank published with Steidl, along with interviews, essays and documentary photos, Books and Films, 1947–2019 is a tribute to Frank’s diverse and influential bookmaking practice.
Gerhard Steidl began working with Robert Frank in 1989, when Swiss publisher Walter Keller asked him to print Frank’s The Lines of My Hand for his imprint Scalo: “You’ll both get along well on press,” Keller had said. And so Robert Frank traveled to Steidl at Düstere Strasse 4 in Göttingen for the first of many visits, to be on press and sign off each printed sheet.
After Scalo closed its doors in 2004, Steidl started to publish as well as print Frank’s books, beginning a long-term working friendship that encompassed every aspect of Frank’s creativity—from reprints of his classic and some lesser-known books (The Americans, Zero Mostel Reads a Book) and the publication of previously unseen projects (Seven Stories) to newly conceived volumes (Tal Uf Tal Ab, Good Days Quiet), as well as his complete films on DVD (Film Works).
In Gerhard Steidl’s words: “Our aim has been to ensure the legacy of this original and seminal artist and that his work will be available and accessible for years to come—all in a form and to a standard that Robert personally oversaw.”
In this, Robert Frank’s newest book, he both acknowledges and moves beyond his acclaimed visual diaries (2010–17), which juxtapose iconic photos from throughout his career with the more personal pictures he makes today and suggestive, often autobiographical text fragments. In Good days quiet Frank’s focus is life inside and outside his beloved weather-beaten wooden house in Mabou, where he has spent summers for decades with his wife June Leaf.
Among portraits of Leaf, Allen Ginsberg and Frank’s son are images of the house’s simple interior with its wood-fueled iron stove, humble furniture and bare light bulbs, and views of the land and sea by the house: snow-covered, windswept, stormy or lit by the dying sun.
Frank’s Polaroid prints show various deliberate states of deterioration and manipulation at his hands, including texts that move from the merely descriptive (“watching the crows”) to the emotive (“memories,” “grey sea—old house / can you hear the music”). As always in Frank’s books, his message lies primarily in the photos’ lyrical sequence, an influential approach to the photobook pioneered by and today well at home in his 94-year-old hands.
Robert Frank was born in Zurich in 1924 and immigrated to the United States in 1947. He is best known for his seminal book The Americans, first published in English in 1959, which gave rise to a distinctly new form of the photobook, and his experimental film Pull My Daisy (1959). Frank’s other important projects include the books Black White and Things (1954), The Lines of My Hand (1972) and the film Cocksucker Blues for the Rolling Stones (1972). He divides his time between New York City and Nova Scotia, Canada.
This magnificent edition of London/Wales—a reprint of the 2007 Steidl edition that included never-before-seen photographs, expanding on Scalo's first edition of 2003—juxtaposes Frank's images of the elegant world of London money with the grimy working-class world of postwar Wales. It brings together two distinct bodies of work, and reveals a significant documentary precedent for The Americans. It also offers an important view of Frank's development, demonstrating an early interest in social commentary, in the narrative potential of photographic sequencing, and innovative use of the expressionistic qualities of the medium.
The book was originally published by Yugensha in Tokyo in 1972, and this new Steidl edition, made in close collaboration with Frank, follows and updates the first US edition by Lustrum Press of 1972.
The Lines of My Hand is structured chronologically and presents selections from every stage of Frank’s work until 1972—from early photos in Switzerland in 1945–46, to images of his travels in Peru, Paris, Valencia, London and Wales, and to contact sheets from his 1955–56 journey through the US that resulted in The Americans. Here too are intimate photos of Frank’s young family, later photo-collages and stills from films including Pull My Daisy and About Me: A Musical.
Published by Steidl/Süddeutsche Zeitung, Munich. Edited with text by Alex Rühle. Text by Philip Brookman, Robert Frank, Sarah Greenough, Gerhard Steidl.
Issued in a pack of five copies, Robert Frank: Books and Films, 1947–2016 (a special edition of the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper, following its original design and format) is the unconventional catalogue to a traveling retrospective exhibition, recently shown at New York University, featuring interviews, essays, letters and opinion pieces alongside rich picture sequences printed on newsprint.
The exhibition presents six decades of books and films made by Robert Frank (born 1924) against the background of his iconic photographs. These images are shown in an immediate and straightforward way--printed on nearly 10-foot sheets of newsprint and installed unframed on the wall--and contextualized with information about Frank’s life, his working processes and broader cultural history.
Robert Frank: Books and Films, 1947–2016 recreates the raw, innovative approach of the exhibition in an unpretentious and accessible printed object. Frank himself summarizes the appeal of the “catalogue”: “Cheap, quick and dirty, that’s how I like it!”
Here, still lifes taken in Frank’s home in Bleecker Street, New York, and landscapes around his house in Mabou, Nova Scotia, jostle alongside spontaneous portraits of friends, colleagues and his wife, the artist June Leaf, as well as vintage postcards. With these images Frank creates a seemingly casual layout that recalls the look and spirit of a private album or scrapbook.
Equally humble and ambitious, Leon of Juda shows how the past tempers Frank’s present and how his life is not only documented in, but shaped by, bookmaking.
Published by Steidl. Text by Robert Frank, Ayumi Yamazaki.
Yet another superb volume in the photographer’s popular series of visual diaries, What We Have Seen is all about people and places in the long and convivial life of Robert Frank (born 1924). Opening and closing with the zoom on the dial of a clock tower, serving as a reminder of the silent but constant passage of time, the book is laden with memories and pictures of old photographs. Like a leitmotif carrying us through the images, the word "souvenir" pops up under a magnifying glass positioned on a French text as a reading device. Frank’s house in Mabou is once again portrayed as a popular retreat for people such as Jack Kerouac, Gerhard Steidl, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Frank’s family members. As ever, Frank’s visual diaries constitute an important part of both his later work and developments in the ongoing art of the photobook.
Published by Steidl. Edited by Ute Eskildsen. Text by Ute Eskildsen, Christoph Ribbat, Wolfgang Beilenhoff. Interview by Ute Eskildsen.
Hold Still, Keep Going is the long-awaited reprint of the catalogue to Robert Frank’s (born 1924) 2001 exhibition at the Museum Folkwang in Essen. Though the artist is best known for his seminal photobook The Americans (1959) and his experimental film Pull My Daisy (1959), until this publication, little scholarship existed on the intersection between Frank’s work in the disciplines of photography and film.
Hold Still, Keep Going fills that void, exploring the influence of film on Frank’s photographic work, and the interaction between the still and moving image that has engaged the photographer and experimental filmmaker since the late 1950s. The book adopts a nonchronological approach, including photographs, film stills, 35mm filmstrips, as well as photomontages that present Frank’s most famous series alongside less known work; from these varied contents, the volume offers revealing juxtapositions, rendering the seemingly disjointed arc of Frank’s art more cohesive. Text, from handwritten phrases on photographs (of which “HOLD STILL—keep going” is but one example) to the dialogue in his films, emerges as a crucial tool, one that is also central to Frank’s photo-diaries.
Including a new essay from Tobia Bezzola, director of the Museum Folkwang, this edition highlights some of the more obscure work by perhaps the world’s best-known living photographer, and is an essential addition to all photography and film collections.
The significance of Robert Frank’s photography is unquestionable. His The Americans is arguably the most important American photography publication of the postwar period, and his work has spawned numerous disciples, as well as a rich critical literature. It is less known that at the very moment he became a star—the end of the 1950s—Frank chose to abandon still photography for more than ten years in order to immerse himself in filmmaking. He did return to photography in the 1970s, but Frank the filmmaker has remained a well-kept secret for almost four decades. A compilation examining his missing years is long overdue. Film Works includes four DVDs in PAL and NTSC format, and comes with the book Frank Films (edited by Brigitta Burger-Utzer and Stefan Grissemann)—offering a visually unique approach to Frank’s films—and the booklets Me & My Brother and Pull My Daisy, all packaged in a custom-made wooden case. This elaborate object provides a comprehensive overview of more than 25 films and videos, some of them classics of the New American Cinema of the 1950s and 1960s.
Digital Mastering by Assemblage Inc./Laura Israel.
Robert Frank was born in Zurich in 1924 and immigrated to the United States in 1947. He is best known for his seminal book The Americans, first published in 1958, which gave rise to a distinctly new form of the photobook, and his experimental film Pull My Daisy (1959). Frank’s other important projects include the books Black, White and Things (1952), The Lines of My Hand (1972) and the film Cocksucker Blues for the Rolling Stones (1972). He divides his time between New York City and Nova Scotia, Canada.
In Partida, Robert Frank continues the journey through his archives, presenting us with a new series of images of friends, colleagues, interiors, of quiet still lives and snap shots of both ordinary and unexpected objects and situations. Frank's visual diaries constitute an important part of both his later work and the ongoing art of the photo book.
Published by Steidl. Edited with text by Peter Galassi.
Because of the importance of Robert Frank's The Americans; because he turned to filmmaking in 1959, the same year the book appeared in the United States; and because he made very different kinds of pictures when he returned to still photography in the 1970s, most of Frank's American work of the 1950s is poorly known. This book, based on the important Frank collection at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, is the first to focus on that work. Its careful sequence of 131 plates integrates 22 photographs from The Americans with more than 100 unknown or unfamiliar images to chart the major themes and pictorial strategies of Frank's work in the United States in the 1950s. Peter Galassi's text presents a thorough reconsideration of Frank's first photographic career and examines in detail how he used the full range of photography's vital 35mm vocabulary to reclaim the medium's artistic tradition from the hegemony of the magazines.
Household Inventory Record is a new installment in the series of Robert Frank's recent visual diaries. Composed of Polaroids, this slim volume continues the journey into Frank's world and his imagery, showing us snapshots from his travels, of his friends and everyday curiosities.
Following its acclaimed predecessors Tal Uf Tal Ab (2010) and You Would (2012), Park / Sleep is the third in the series of Robert Frank's late visual diaries. It takes up his familiar collage technique, combining new and old snapshots mainly of Frank's friends, family and home/studio, but also scenic and urban settings and interiors. The images are accompanied by short texts--notes, pieces of conversations, poems and thoughts.
You Would is a sequel to Robert Frank's acclaimed Tal Uf Tal Ab of 2010. It contains recent images--some shot on 35 mm, others Polaroids--of Frank's friends, acquaintances and surroundings in New York and Mabou, Nova Scotia. In the book are also iconic images from earlier in Frank's career such as a photo of Delphine Seyrig and Larry Rivers on the set of Frank's 1959 film Pull My Daisy. This careful edit of new and old suggests that past experience tempers Frank's present, and shows that his life is not only recorded by book-making but shaped by it.
Published by Steidl. Contributions by Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, John Cohen.
Pull My Daisy is a collectable object containing Robert Frank's famous film of 1959 on DVD; a text booklet with an introduction, the transcript of the film and lyrics to the opening song; and a photo-magazine of on-set documentary photos by John Cohen. Pull My Daisy typifies the Beat Generation. Directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, the film was adapted by Jack Kerouac from the third act of a stage play he never finished entitled Beat Generation. Kerouac also provided improvised narration. It stars Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Larry Rivers, Peter Orlovsky, David Amram, Richard Bellamy, Alice Neel, Sally Gross and Pablo, Frank's then infant son. Based on an incident in the life of Neal Cassady and his wife Carolyn, the movie tells the story of a railway brakeman whose painter wife invites a respectable bishop over for dinner. However, the brakeman's bohemian friends crash the party, with comic results. Pull My Daisy was praised for years as an improvisational masterpiece, until Leslie revealed in 1968 that the film was actually carefully planned, rehearsed, and directed by him and Frank.
In 1950, Robert Frank left his job as a photographer in New York to travel through Europe with his family. That summer he arrived in Valencia, Spain, which was at the time a humble, bleak place enduring the austere conditions of the postwar period like the rest of the country. The pictures Frank took of Valencia depict the daily life of a fishing village. His portrayal is so natural and clear that further verbal explanation seems superfluous; they simply reflect, in the photo grapher's words, "the humanity of the moment." The photographs in this book, many of which have never been published before, allow dignity to override poverty.
In August 1992 Robert Frank's good friend Reginald Rankin invited Frank on a trip to Pangnirtung, a village of around 1,300 Inuit inhabitants in the Arctic Circle. This book is Frank's documentation of the five-day sojourn. Frank depicts Pangnirtung void of its people: the still harbor, public housing, a convenience store, a telephone post. Sincere without being sentimental, the photos are shaped by a short text from Frank himself.
Tal Uf Tal Ab shows Robert Frank's life now, an inquisitive existence shaped by memory, and includes photographs of newsstands, streetscapes, friends, his wife June Leaf, interiors, as well as a self-portrait. Scattered among these images are earlier ones from Frank's past, for example a candid portrait of Jack Kerouac. As with all Frank's publications, Tal Uf Tal Ab is a humble yet important progression in the medium of the photo book.
Published by Steidl/The Robert Frank Project. Edited 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.
Published by National Gallery Of Art, Washington/Steidl. Edited with text by Sarah Greenough. Text by Anne Wilkes Tucker, Stuart Alexander, Martin Gasser, Jeff Rosenheim, Michel Frizot, Luc Sante, Philip Brookman.
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.
Looking In: Robert Frank's "The Americans" celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of this prescient book. Drawing on newly examined archival sources, it provides a fascinating in-depth examination of the making of the photographs and the book's construction, using vintage contact sheets, work prints and letters that literally chart Frank's journey around the country on a Guggenheim grant in 1955–56. Curator and editor Sarah Greenough and her colleagues also explore the roots of The Americans in Frank's earlier books, which are abundantly illustrated here, and in books by photographers Walker Evans, Bill Brandt and others. The 83 original photographs from The Americans are presented in sequence in as near vintage prints as possible. The catalogue concludes with an examination of Frank's later reinterpretations and deconstructions of The Americans, bringing full circle the history of this resounding entry in the annals of photography. This volume is a reprint of the 2009 edition.
Colored records of Robert Frank’s homes, travels and the people around him, the Polaroid photographs gathered in this set express the artist’s immediate environment. Four small books in a slipcase, Away presents images of Frank’s life at and beyond his homes in New York and Mabou, Nova Scotia--hotel rooms, self-portraits, seascapes, a sunset cast on a door frame, orchids on a windowsill against a shifting grey sky. Ever restless, Frank delights in playing with the sequence of his Polaroids, constructing an unfinished autobiography while expanding the possibilities of the instant photograph.
Published by Steidl. Introduction by Jack Kerouac.
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.
Pull My Daisy, The Sin of Jesus, Me and My Brother
Published by Steidl/The Robert Frank Project.
The significance of Robert Frank's photography is unquestionable. His The Americans is arguably the most important American photography publication of the postwar period, and his work has spawned numerous disciples, as well as a rich critical literature. However, it is also true that at the very moment he became a star--the end of the 1950s--Frank chose to abandon still photography for more than 10 years in order to entrench himself in filmmaking. Steidl's long-overdue DVD compilation of the Complete Film Works provides a comprehensive overview of more than 25 films and videos, some of them classics of the New American Cinema of the 1950s and 1960s. Volume I features a booklet with several in-depth essays and new stills taken from the original films and videos, as well as a DVD containing Me and My Brother, Frank's first feature-length work; The Sin of Jesus, based on a story by Isaac Babel and with music by Morton Feldman; and the seminal Pull My Daisy, a 1959 short film co-directed by Alfred Leslie, starring Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Larry Rivers, Peter Orlovsky, David Amram, Richard Bellamy, Alice Neel, Sally Gross and Frank's then-infant son, and narrated by Jack Kerouac. One of the most important experimental films of the twentieth century, Pull My Daisy, has been deemed "culturally significant" by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.
Published by Steidl. Edited by Robert Frank, Ute Eskildsen.
The publication of Paris marks the first time that the significant body of photographs which Robert Frank made in Paris in the early 1950s have been brought together in a single book. Having left Switzerland in 1924, this 1951 trip to France was only Frank's second return to Europe after he had settled in New York City in 1947, and some of the images he made during that visit have become iconic in the history of the medium. The 80 photographs reproduced here, which were selected by Frank and editor Ute Eskildsen, suggest that Frank's experience of the "new world" had sharpened his eye for European urbanism. He saw the city's streets as a stage for human activity and focused particularly on the flower sellers. His work clearly references Atget and invokes the tradition of the flaneur.
Keep Busy, About Me: A Musical, S-8 Stones Footage from Exile on Main Street
Published by Steidl/The Robert Frank Project.
Robert Frank, born in Zurich in 1924, has made, in his 50-year career, an unquestionably significant contribution to photography. His seminal book The Americans is arguably the most important American photography publication of the postwar period. His work continues to influence photographers and has spawned a rich body of theoretical writing. Yet at the very moment Frank became an art-world star at the end of the 1950s, he abandoned still photography to become a filmmaker. Though he did return to photography in the 1970s, Frank the filmmaker has remained a well-kept secret for almost four decades. A compilation examining his missing years is long overdue. Robert Frank: The Complete Film Works details each one of Frank's more than 25 films and videos--many of them classics of 1950s and 60s New American Cinema. Volume 3 of the set, this beautifully packaged publication, features three DVDs--which include Keep Busy (1975), About Me: A Musical (1971) and S-8 Stones Footage from Exile on Main Street (1972)--in a film-roll-box slipcase.
The female subject absorbed in a book has prompted masterworks from Vermeer, Monet, Vuillard and Matisse, among many others. Less often portrayed are men in the act of reading--even Manet’s portrait of Émile Zola depicts the writer staring away from his open volume. Is it the supposed passivity of this act that has discouraged men from modeling it? This mini-genre remains even less explored yet by photographers, though it surely offers the supreme opportunity for coaxing subjects of either sex into unself-consciousness, if not outright reverie. In Zero Mostel Reads a Book, Robert Frank takes a male comic actor for his subject but flouts the genre’s quietist sobriety in every way possible. Mostel is depicted in cartoonish dimensions, bemused, baffled and apoplectic, as he makes his way through an unidentified hardback volume, while seated at a table or on a sofa in a large lounge area. First published in 1963 by The New York Times “for the fun of it” and a collector’s item ever since, this lovely publication relates a series of theatrical and playful vignettes in which Mostel’s most famous roles--Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, Pseudolus in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and Max Bialystock in The Producers--are clearly signaled. It is a delightful moment of slapstick in the Frank oeuvre.
Published by Steidl. Introduction by Jerry Tallmer. Text by Jack Kerouac.
First take best take, to paraphrase Allen Ginsberg, was for years the ethos presumed to have governed the making of Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie's classic Beat Generation film Pull My Daisy (1959)--until Leslie revealed in 1968 that its scenes had been as scripted and rehearsed as any Hollywood movie. Even Jack Kerouac's famous voiceover narration, which careens wonderfully in and out of sync with the action, was actually composed in advance, performed four times and then mixed from three separate takes. But the film remains a supreme document of Beat Generation energy at its peak, with several of its key players starring: Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Larry Rivers, Peter Orlovsky, David Amram, Richard Bellamy, Alice Neel, Sally Gross and Pablo Frank (Robert Frank's then-infant son). Based on an incident in the life of Beat muse Neal Cassady and his wife Carolyn, Daisy tells the story of a railway brakeman whose painter wife has invited a respectable bishop over for dinner at their Bowery apartment. The brakeman's "Beatnik" friends crash the occasion, and the playful provocations ("Is baseball holy?") they put to the bishop ("Strange thoughts you young people have!") baffle the clergyman's propriety and expectation of a "civilized" evening. This book interweaves the script of Kerouac's narration with film stills, and also includes a 1961 introduction by Jerry Tallmer.
In March 1949, Robert Frank mailed a birthday gift to his mother in Switzerland: A maquette of a series of photographs he had made during a visit to Peru between June and December of the previous year. Frank assembled an identical book for himself, and these two maquettes now reside in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York and the National Gallery of Art, Washington. A few of the images are well known in Frank's oeuvre, but until now very few people have seen the entire series--which, in 1949, already displayed the hallmark of Frank's distinctive image-sequencing. Peru also exhibits an ease and flexibility that Frank himself confirms: "I was very free with the camera. I didn't think of what would be the correct thing to do; I did what I felt good doing. I was like an action painter." Using a hand-held 35mm Leica camera, Frank documented the country's massive vistas, weathered faces, manual labor and dusty roads stretching to the horizon with a spontaneity of motion that propels the viewer into the midst of the scenery. For the first time, and under the direction of Frank himself, this book presents the complete sequence of images. Peru is a work of major significance in both the artist's history and the history of photography. Published in association with the National Gallery of Art, Washington.
Conversations in Vermont, Liferaft Earth, OK End Here
Published by Steidl/The Robert Frank Project.
Here is volume two of Robert Frank's long-awaited Complete Film Works. At the end of the 1950s, Frank abandoned traditional still photography to become a filmmaker. He eventually returned to photography in the 1970s, but Frank, as a filmmaker, has remained a well-kept secret for almost four decades. Volume two comprises Conversations in Vermont, Liferaft Earth and OK End Here. Conversations in Vermont was produced in 1969, and was Frank's first autobiographical film, addressing his relationship with his two teenaged children, and partly told through his narration over filmed images of his photographs, family photographs and world famous images. Liferaft Earth opens with a newspaper report from Hayward, California: "Sandwiched between a restaurant and supermarket, 100 anti-population protesters spent their second starving day in a plastic enclosure...The so-called Hunger Show, a week-long starve-in aimed at dramatizing man's future in an overpopulated, underfed world…." This film was made for Stewart Brand, the visionary founder of the international ecological movement and publisher of the bestselling Whole Earth Catalog (1968-85). OK End Here is Frank's 1963 short film about inertia in a modern relationship. The film alternates between semi-documentary scenes and shots composed with rigid formality, and suggests the influence of the French Nouvelle Vague and Michelangelo Antonioni's films.
Robert Frank was born in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1924 and went to the United States in 1947. He is best known for his seminal book The Americans, first published in 1958, which gave rise to a distinct new art form in the photo book, and his experimental film Pull My Daisy, made in 1959.
In November of 1991 Robert Frank went to Beirut on a commission to photograph the city's devastated downtown in the aftermath of the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990). Much of the work he did there, together with that of five other photographers with whom he shared the assignment, was put together in Beirut City Centre by Editions du Cypres in 1992. Alongside that commissioned work, he also made Polaroids of the city and its environs, which, on his return home, he stowed away in his studio. It was only many years later that he considered those images again, and used them to create a sketchbook's worth of Polaroid collages. Come Again is a facsimile reprint of that notebook. In recent years Frank has worked almost exclusively with Polaroids, exploring the collage and assemblage possibilities of the instant photograph. Come Again, which comes as a sewn softcover in a paper bag, printed with special four-color matt inks and a Polaroid varnish, offers insight into the early stages of Frank's experimentation with the Polaroid and presents a previously unseen artist's book.
Published by Steidl. Essays by Philip Brookman, Robert Coles and Anne Wilkes Tucker. Introduction by Peter C. Marzio.
Ephemera captures our curiosity. Through it, we get a glimpse into the personalities, personal moments and ponderings, and sentiments of beloved public figures. Presented here are many such glimpses, along with several longer looks, into the life of legendary photographer, Robert Frank. New York to Nova Scotia was originally published in 1986 to accompany a retrospective exhibition organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and has long been out of print. The book is the best source for much of the most absorbing material on the great artist: there are letters from a young Robert Frank to his parents telling them of New York, there is a facsimile of his 1954 proposal (considered a landmark document in the history of photography) to the Guggenheim Foundation that started his legendary journey across America, a letter from an Arkansas State policeman who arrested Frank during his trip to produce the photographs in his masterpiece, The Americans, as well with such other items like an account by Jack Kerouac about the trip he made with Robert Frank to Florida. The theme of this account is the now-classic one of a modern artist's restless peregrinations--travel as a physical and spiritual journey, as search and as self-discovery. The chronology and personal spirit of Frank's complex career as a photographer and filmmaker are evoked through these previously unpublished letters, pictures, reviews and essays, as well as through 18 of his classic photographs. Some of the letters are by Frank; others were written by photographers and contemporaries, such as W. Eugene Smith, Louis Faurer, Keith Smith and Gotthard Schuh, and by legendary curators Hugh Edwards and Robert Delpire. (Frank's writings reveal his lesser-known talents as a literary artist.) Authors of the essays include Walker Evans, Jonas Mekas, Allen Ginsberg and Robert Coles, as well as the exhibition curators, Philip Brookman and Anne Tucker. New York to Nova Scotia also includes still images from Frank's films and pictures of Frank throughout his career.
Robert Frank: Books and Films, 1947–2019
Robert Frank: Good days quiet
Robert Frank: London/Wales
Robert Frank: The Lines of My Hand
Robert Frank: Books and Films
Robert Frank: Leon of Juda
Robert Frank: What We Have Seen
Robert Frank: Hold Still, Keep Going
Robert Frank: Film Works
Robert Frank: Partida
Robert Frank: In America
Robert Frank: Household Inventory Record
Robert Frank: Park / Sleep
Robert Frank: You Would
Robert Frank: Pull My Daisy
Robert Frank: Valencia
Robert Frank: Pangnirtung
Robert Frank: Tal uf Tal ab
Robert Frank: Hold Still, Keep Going
Looking In: Robert Frank's The Americans
Robert Frank: Away
Robert Frank: The Americans
Robert Frank: The Complete Film Works: Volume 1
Robert Frank: Paris
Robert Frank: The Complete Film Works: Vol. 3
Robert Frank: Zero Mostel Reads a Book
Robert Frank: Pull My Daisy
Robert Frank: Peru
Robert Frank: The Complete Film Works: Volume 2
Robert Frank: Come Again
Robert Frank: New York To Nova Scotia