[.ca] The Americans (ISBN 386521584X)

From Amazon.com:
Armed with a camera and a fresh cache of film and bankrolled by a Guggenheim Foundation grant, Robert Frank crisscrossed the United States during 1955 and 1956. The photographs he brought back form a portrait of the country at the time and hint at its future. He saw the hope of the future in the faces of a couple at city hall in Reno, Nevada, and the despair of the present in a grimy roofscape. He saw the roiling racial tension, glamour, and beauty, and, perhaps because Frank himself was on the road, he was particularly attuned to Americans' love for cars. Funeral-goers lean against a shiny sedan, lovers kiss on a beach blanket in front of their parked car, young boys perch in the back seat at a drive-in movie. A sports car under a drop cloth is framed by two California palm trees; on the next page, a blanket is draped over a car accident victim's body in Arizona. Robert Frank's Americans reappear 40 years after they were initially published in this exquisite volume by Scalo. Each photograph (there are more than 80 of them) stands alone on a page, while the caption information is included at the back of the book, allowing viewers an unfettered look at the images. Jack Kerouac's original introduction, commissioned when the photographer showed the writer his work while sitting on a sidewalk one night outside of a party, provides the only accompanying text. Kerouac's words add narrative dimension to Frank's imagery while in turn the photographs themselves perfectly illustrate the writer's own work.

a SWISS guy with a GERMAN camera taking AMERICAN pictures:
this is the only book to buy if you are interested in photography. every image is true. if you ever have a chance to view the actual prints, don't miss them. i have learned more about photography from looking at this book than any other source. it is a masterpiece.

The book to own:
If you would own only one photo book that one might be it....

RF's masterpiece as work in progress:
Like an elusive text in search of itself, Robert Frank's 1958 book The Americans has changed format each of the four times it's changed publishers. From the text heavy French version to the oversized aperture reprint, Frank has continued to refine his work each time it appears in print. In the Scalo version, the place-name captions have been removed from the pages opposite the photographs and collected in the back of the book. Forget any ideas you might have of Frank's book being a travelogue. In place of the itinerary, the Scalo edition finally establishes the ORDER of the book's photographs as the crucial ingredient in Frank's complex vision of America. The 83-photograph sequence cuts between elliptical narrative of the open road and comparative sociology of dead-end lives as Frank turns free association into inescapable logic and then back again. The result is the most masterful combination of photographs in book form. The subjects of Frank's photographs roam this fractured typology like prophets locked in an unstable time loop. Geography no longer takes center stage as the formative element of their photographic selves. In some small but significant way, the americans in the Scalo edition reclaim the intentionality of their sadness, anger, and alienation. The bitter and often unwilling nature of their engagements with Frank take center stage, each as profound an act of refusal as Frank's own denunciation of the pasteboard optimism of '50s America.

PHOTOGRAPHER BIBLE:
After 19 years of working as a pro photographer, I was simply stunted, wordless and sad, because not having a pearle like this in my library. Simply-PERFECT!!!

A classic of 20th Century Photography:
In 1955, Swiss photographer Robert Frank traveled around the United States on a Guggenheim Fellowship. The images he created were published first in France in 1958, and then the following year in America. Highly controversial in its day, "The Americans" gave us a much needed outsiders view of who we are as a people. Frank is an incredibly skilled image maker, able communicate on many different levels with a single image. Jack Kerouac is the perfect person to write the intro to this book. Both artists worked in a similar way, using travel, speed and chance to communicate fleeting, yet deep, feelings about our complex culture. Perfectly enjoyable by anyone with an interest in American culture, but essential for those practicing documentary photography.