There are photography books, and then there is The Americans.
When Robert Frank crossed the country between 1955 and 1957 — armed with a Leica, a Guggenheim fellowship, and an outsider's eye — he came back with 83 photographs that changed what photography could be. Not the America of civic pride and postwar optimism, but the America of jukeboxes and funeral parlors, of lonely diners and segregated trolley cars, of flags obscuring faces and highways going nowhere in particular. It was a vision so raw that American publishers initially rejected it. First published in France in 1958, it arrived in the U.S. a year later via Grove Press — with an introduction by Jack Kerouac that remains one of the great pieces of writing about photography.
This copy is the 2008 Steidl edition — the definitive version, designed by Frank himself in collaboration with publisher Gerhard Steidl and printed at Steidl's renowned digital darkroom in Göttingen, Germany. Not a reprint. A reconsideration: Frank revisited the sequencing, the reproduction, the physical object itself. The result is the edition that museums, photographers, and serious collectors regard as the standard.
Condition: Near Fine. Cover clean and bright, spine tight with no cracking, interior pages fresh and unmarked.
Edition: 2008 Steidl, Göttingen. Hardcover. ISBN 978-3-86521-584-0. Introduction © 1959 Jack Kerouac, reprinted by permission of the Sterling Lord Agency.
There are photography books, and then there is The Americans.
When Robert Frank crossed the country between 1955 and 1957 — armed with a Leica, a Guggenheim fellowship, and an outsider's eye — he came back with 83 photographs that changed what photography could be. Not the America of civic pride and postwar optimism, but the America of jukeboxes and funeral parlors, of lonely diners and segregated trolley cars, of flags obscuring faces and highways going nowhere in particular. It was a vision so raw that American publishers initially rejected it. First published in France in 1958, it arrived in the U.S. a year later via Grove Press — with an introduction by Jack Kerouac that remains one of the great pieces of writing about photography.
This copy is the 2008 Steidl edition — the definitive version, designed by Frank himself in collaboration with publisher Gerhard Steidl and printed at Steidl's renowned digital darkroom in Göttingen, Germany. Not a reprint. A reconsideration: Frank revisited the sequencing, the reproduction, the physical object itself. The result is the edition that museums, photographers, and serious collectors regard as the standard.
Condition: Near Fine. Cover clean and bright, spine tight with no cracking, interior pages fresh and unmarked.
Edition: 2008 Steidl, Göttingen. Hardcover. ISBN 978-3-86521-584-0. Introduction © 1959 Jack Kerouac, reprinted by permission of the Sterling Lord Agency.
