Robert Frank

Les Americains

The Americans

1958 True 1st Edition

Hardcover, cover drawings by Saul Steinberg. (= Encyclopédie essentielle 5. Serie histoire N° 3), with texts by Alain Bosquet, Simone de Beauvoir, Erskine Caldwell, John Dos Passos, Henry Miller, William Faulkner, John Seinbeck and others.

„Robert Frank spent most of the late 1950s making "a number of short trips out from New York and one long (nine-month) journey to the West Coast in a 1950 Ford to photograph America. From the more than 20,000 images that resulted, Frank eventually chose 83 of them and arranged them into four chapters. 'With these photographs,' he later wrote, 'I have attempted to show a cross-section of the American population. My effort was to express it simply and without confusion. The view is personal.' Such a simple intention for a book that would so alter the course of modern photography" (Andrew Roth, The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century)

Pages: 172
Place: Paris
Year: 1958
Publisher: Delpire
Size: 21 x 19 cm (approx.)

Included in "The Photobook: A History Volume I" by Parr/Badger

Les Americains.

Photographs by Robert Frank.

Texts in French by Simone de Beauvoir, Bernard Iddings Bell, Alain Bosquet, John Brown, Omar N. Bradley, Erskine Caldwell, John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, Andre Maurois, Henry Miller, Claude Roy, John Steinbeck, Walt Whitman, Richard Wright.

Edited by Alain Bosquet.

Encyclopedie Essentielle/Robert Delpire, Paris,

1958. First edition. Original edition.

174 pages.

Oblong octavo.

Glazed paper over boards.

Cover design by Saul Steinberg.

No dust jacket as issued.

Numerous gravure reproductions.

"...paved the way for three decades of photographs exploring the personal poetics of lived experience. Many memorable photobooks have been derived from this mass of material. None has been more memorable, more influential, nor more fully realized than Frank's masterpiece."--Martin Parr and Gerry Badger, The Photobook: A History, Vol. 1 Unlike the Grove Press edition published the following year, in legendary publisher Robert Delpire's first French edition--with its politically charged texts printed on pages facing the photos--Frank's acerbic documentary of post-war American life comes across more as a biting exposé of the ennui and provincialism lurking beneath the surface than as a "sad poem sucked out of America," in Kerouac's famous words.

Les Americains [The Americans].

FRANK, Robert.

Paris: Delpire, 1957.

First edition of the photographer’s masterpiece with 83 black-and-white full-page photogravures. Oblong quarto, original boards illustrated by Saul Steinberg. In near fine condition.

ack Kerouac wrote in his preface of The Americans, "Robert Frank he sucked a sad poem out of America onto film, taking rank among the tragic poets of the world. To Robert Frank I now give this message. You got eyes." Frank’s Américains eventually achieved legendary status as "the most renowned photobook of all It struck a chord with a whole generation of American photographers Many memorable photobooks have been derived from this mass of material. None has been more memorable, more influential, nor more fully realized than Frank’s masterpiece" (Parr & Badger I:247). "From the more than 20,000 images that resulted, Frank eventually chose 83 of them and arranged them into four chapters ‘With these photographs,’ he later wrote, ‘I have attempted to show a cross-section of the American population. My effort was to express it simply and without confusion. The view is personal’ Such a simple intention for a book that would so alter the course of modern photography" (Roth, 150).