Robert Frank's iconic photobook 'The Americans' gets re-release

To celebrate 100 years since the birth of Swiss American photographer Robert Frank, his iconic photobook The Americans is to be re-released.

Born in Zurich in 1924, Frank is best known for The Americans, first published in 1958, which gave rise to a distinct new art form in the photobook.

The book, which featured eighty-three photographs taken across the country and an introduction by Jack Kerouac, unveiled an America that had gone previously unacknowledged—confronting its people with an underbelly of racial inequality, corruption, injustice, and the stark reality of the American dream.

At its release The Americans was highly controversial - the work was described as featuring “grainy, blurry, muddy exposures, drunken horizons," and Popular Photography called Frank “a joyless man who hates the country of his adoption.” 

Part of the controversy involved the project itself - Frank was a European Jew, who, with the help of the Guggenheim Fellowship, had travelled more than 10,000 miles with his trusty Leica 35mm camera, and captured a raw, unfiltered postwar America as few wanted to imagine it.

Despite this, the book is now considered a classic, and has influenced subsequent generations of photographers, including Lee Friedlander, Nan Goldin, Danny Lyon, Joel Meyerowitz, Ed Ruscha, and Garry Winogrand. 

Presented on the centennial of Frank’s birth and coinciding with a major exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, the new version of the book has been released in a limited edition of 1,500 copies, and has been produced following the tritone printing from the 2008 edition for which Frank was personally involved in every step of the design and production.

Frank died in Nova Scotia, Canada, in 2019.

The 180-page book keeps the introduction by Jack Kerouac, and is available for $50 USD ($76 AUD). You can order it from Aperture.org.