Robert Frank

A first edition copy of Les Américains.

• Robert Frank (Swiss-American).
• Paris: Encyclopédie Essentielle, Robert Delpire Éditeur, 1958.
• 172 pages.
• Oblong octavo.
• Includes black-and-white photographs printed in gravure by Draeger Frères.
• With texts by various authors selected by Alain Bosquet.
• Bound in laminated white paper-covered boards illustrated with an illustration by Saul Steinberg printed in light blue, black and red.

"A sad poem for sick people." An uncommonly fine copy of the first published edition of Robert Frank's The Americans, a book that altered the course of twentieth-century photography and held a mirror to the American people. In his successful application for a Guggenheim grant, Frank wrote: "The project I have in mind is one that will shape itself as it proceeds… The material is there; the practice will be in the photographer's hand, the vision in his mind." Between April 1955 and June 1956, he set out on a series of trips across America. He aimed to complete a body of work that would be "a broad, voluminous picture record of things American, past and present... A visual study of a civilisation."

Les Américains follows a careful and complex sequence, with four chapters, each exploring a different aspect of American culture and introduced by a photograph of the American flag. In this, the first edition, the photographs are accompanied by a series of texts by various writers selected by Alain Bosquet.