CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 6/5/2025

A love letter from Robert Frank

Featured spreads are from MFA Publications’ new release, Robert Frank: Mary’s Book, a facsimile reprint of the photographer’s poetic 1949 Paris photobook, made for an audience of one. In its new incarnation, this stitched, 7 x 9.5-inch volume with spot varnished images and faithful reproductions of the original paper—stains, notes (English and French), erasures and all—comes housed in a larger clothbound hardcover book that features additional photographs, essays by Frank scholar Stuart Alexander and MFA curator Kristen Gresh, and annotations transcribing and translating Frank’s notes in the photobook that he produced for his beloved, Mary Lockspeiser, just one year before they would marry, in 1950, in New York City. “On the book’s cover is its simply written raison d’être,” Alexander writes: “‘This is for you. It is not much but I promised you a little story. Maybe this is not a story.’ Mary’s Book, a love letter from Robert to Mary, is a series of unbound pages nestled within one another, filled with handwritten notes and hand-cut prints. The book is more than a keepsake of their burgeoning love affair. It was an important exercise in bookmaking for Frank, evidence of his maturing artistic vision, which led to one of the most influential photobooks of the twentieth century, The Americans (1958).”