- Publisher
- Steidl
- Published
- 2008 (first published 1958)
- Shelf
- photography: Monograph
- ISBN
- 9783865215840
Monograph
The Americans
Robert Frank
Eighty-three photographs from a two-year drive across the United States, sequenced as one argument.
Why read it
Frank photographed jukeboxes, lunch counters, flags and funerals with a tilted, grainy, apparently careless eye, and was attacked for it, then changed what a photograph was allowed to look like. The sequence is the work: the book teaches how meaning accumulates across an edit rather than inside a single frame.
Why own it
This is the founding example of the photobook as a form, and the form only exists as a book, the order, the pacing, one picture per spread with the facing page left empty. A gallery wall or a screen destroys precisely the thing that makes it work.
Who it is for
Photographers and editors learning to sequence, and anyone building a body of work rather than a portfolio.
Reading order
Book 3 of 6 in the photography reading order. See all 6
Read nextOn PhotographySusan SontagSontag then asks what the act of photographing does to the people and places in the picture.Read before thisThe Photographer's Eye
Opens a search on AbeBooks, a network of independent and antiquarian sellers, which is where a good part of this shelf has to be found, because it is out of print.
Read next
Chosen because they argue with this one, not because a machine noticed they share a category.
Also on the·photography shelf