THE AMERICANS by Robert Frank

Aperture, 2024
8.2 × 7.2 in
180 pages
Tritone printing
Hardcover
Cloth wrap with dust jacket

A celebrated return of Robert Frank’s seminal photobook The Americans—one of the most important bodies of photographic work ever made.

First published in France in 1958, then in the United States in 1959, Robert Frank’s The Americans changed the course of twentieth-century photography. In 83 photographs, Frank (1924–2019) looked beneath the surface of American life to reveal a people plagued by racism, ill-served by their politicians, and rendered numb by a rapidly expanding culture of consumption. Yet he also found novel areas of beauty in simple, overlooked corners of American life. It was not just Frank’s subject matter—cars, jukeboxes, and even the road itself—that redefined the icons of America. It was also his seemingly intuitive, immediate, off-kilter style, as well as his method of brilliantly linking his photographs together thematically, conceptually, formally, and linguistically, that made The Americans so innovative. Less a literal document than an ode or poem, the book is as powerful and provocative today as it was 66 years ago.

“I was passionate about losers. That was maybe the political [angle]. People that were taken advantage of, that couldn't make it—that could never make it. Those people I felt passionate about.” 

—Robert Frank