A Quick Note about The Americans and Robert Frank from Pradip
Malde, Professor of Fine Arts at Sewanee, to compliment the 10 Photo Books of 2009 List. Be sure and check
out Pradip’s evocative Haiti Portfolio. Pradip leads a documentary photography class there most summers. From Pradip:
Robert Frank's 'The Americans' has become one of several
commentaries on American culture and politics that is insightful, cautionary,
and almost prescient. Others that come to mind in this cluster are Alexis de
Tocquevile's 'Democracy in America' (1835 and 1840) and Jack Kerouac's 'On the
Road' (1951). Frank travelled across the USA for some two years during the mid-1950s,
generating almost 30,000 exposures. The resulting edit of 83 photographs was
published in the USA by Delpire Press in 1959. Fifty years on, Senior Curator
of Photographs at the National Gallery of Art, Sarah Greenough, presents us
with an incredible reconsideration of Frank's work. 'Looking In: Robert Frank's
The Americans - expanded edition' maps out the relationships between the
creative processes of an artist and the culture of a nation, the tensions
between expression and commodity, and the rigors of doing documentary work. All
of this with essays and, most important, hundreds of richly reproduced archive
images, work prints and contact sheets. This book, the expanded edition, should
be issued with every new American passport.
- Pradip Malde
(Buy The Americans
)
[Note that 'Looking In' is also available in a more condensed
version and is substantially different from the expanded edition.]
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