Americans

Rating:
Summary: PHOTOGRAPHER BIBLE
Review: After 19 years of working as a pro photographer, I was simply stunted, wordless and sad, because not having a pearle like this in my library. Simply-PERFECT!!!

Rating:
Summary: The book to own
Review: If you would own only one photo book that one might be it....

Rating:
Summary: RF's masterpiece as work in progress
Review: Like an elusive text in search of itself, Robert Frank's 1958 book The Americans has changed format each of the four times it's changed publishers. From the text heavy French version to the oversized aperture reprint, Frank has continued to refine his work each time it appears in print.

In the Scalo version, the place-name captions have been removed from the pages opposite the photographs and collected in the back of the book. Forget any ideas you might have of Frank's book being a travelogue. In place of the itinerary, the Scalo edition finally establishes the ORDER of the book's photographs as the crucial ingredient in Frank's complex vision of America. The 83-photograph sequence cuts between elliptical narrative of the open road and comparative sociology of dead-end lives as Frank turns free association into inescapable logic and then back again. The result is the most masterful combination of photographs in book form.

The subjects of Frank's photographs roam this fractured typology like prophets locked in an unstable time loop. Geography no longer takes center stage as the formative element of their photographic selves. In some small but significant way, the americans in the Scalo edition reclaim the intentionality of their sadness, anger, and alienation. The bitter and often unwilling nature of their engagements with Frank take center stage, each as profound an act of refusal as Frank's own denunciation of the pasteboard optimism of '50s America.

Rating:
Summary: A Masterpiece That Revolutionized Photography
Review: Robert Frank with this small little book changed the course of photography. He changed the way people take photographs. He changed the way we look at photographs. He changed the definition of what was an acceptable or good photograph. The way Monet and Picasso changed how one could paint, Frank changed the way one could photograph.

How did he do this? He basically introduced the "icongraphic photograph" to the world. Take for example, his picture in the Americans of a political rally for Ike. It is of a man standing against a blank wall, playing the tuba. But the tuba's opening obscures his face, all you see is the big blank dark opening of the the tuba where his eyes and mouth are suppossed to be. And then right behind the tuba, almost coming out of it, a flag, an American flag, though shapeless, and formless and it snakes out of the picture. On the man's lapel is a big "For Ike" button. At the time, this was a radical photograph and statement about politics and the role of the individual in political life; remember this was 1957.

There are many many many other photographs like this throughout the Americans: St. Peter taking on City Hall. The American flag covering the faces of the people at a parade. The jukebox everywhere. The signs screaming "No Negroes Allowed" while on the next page is a photograph of an older black women holding in her arms, caring for, a young white baby. Frank clearly asking, screaming, why is it okay for them to care your for babies but not okay for them to use the same toilet as you?

It is a subtle but very powerful book. And once you see it, once you get it, you can never see a photograph the same way again.

He has influenced every photographer who has come after him.
Without Robert Frank there would be no Gary Winograd, Eugene Richards, Gilles Peres, William Klien, Bruce Davidson, Alex Webb, Salgado, Danny Lyon, James Nachtwey, Lauren Greenblatt, Ron Haviv, or Herb Ritts.

This book is the starting point for anyone interested in photography, or at least photography after 1958 when this book was first published.


Rating:
Summary: A beautiful, brilliant, seminal, stirring look at America.
Review: The Americans is perhaps the most influential photography book published in the last 40 years. Swiss-born Robert Frank's images must have seemed completely revolutionary and startling when published in 1958. Frank used his camera to cut through the facade of a country that was beginning to build up its crust of macadam and marketing. Frank shot with available light using film that would be considered very slow by today's standards, yet his images, while many have visible grain, are gorgeous and have a full range of tones. To describe the images themselves is fruitless. Buy the book

Rating:
Summary: PHOTOGRAPHY.
Review: There are three types of photographers.
The first are with goals of one day selling out to a magazine or whomever has a wallet.
The second are the hobbyists who prance around the city with their Leicas.
The third is Robert Frank. Thank you for sharing your pictures.

Rating:
Summary: PHOTOGRAPHY.
Review: This book re-affirms for me, the power of photography.

It grants me permisssion to look at the world again with fresh eyes, enjoying all that humanity and nature has to offer.

I find the images speak to me in a timeless manner and are a joy to behold.

I am still surprised that it received such a cold reception when it was first published, but as a Gen Xer I geuss it was another world in those days.

Buy this book you'll not regret it.

Rating:
Summary: a SWISS guy with a GERMAN camera taking AMERICAN pictures
Review: this is the only book to buy if you are interested in photography. every image is true. if you ever have a chance to view the actual prints, don't miss them. i have learned more about photography from looking at this book than any other source. it is a masterpiece.

Rating:
Summary: There's nothing left to say
Review: What can one say about a classic? Is it possible to review Beethoven's Ninth? Faulker's "As I Lay Dying"? No. This is arguably the book that most influenced almost all the subsequent generations of photographers. Frank looked at the world with a fresh viewpoint and his photographs were a slap in the face. It's impossible to put ourselves in the world of photography that preceded this book because Frank has changed our prespectives so drastically.