Les Américains

▪️ LES AMÉRICAINS, 2019

by Robert Frank

In 1955, Robert Frank crisscrossed the United States. Camera in hand he captures the moments of the life of the Americans he meets on his way: a waitress in a diner, a tattooed man napping, workers at work, a shoe shiner, partiers, lovers, bikers, the road itself ... This is not a report but a set of notes taken on the spot: Robert Frank gives birth to a new iconography where anonymous faces blend at the edge of sad roads, in urban outgrowths or the voids of a disproportionate territory. The places and the faces took on the fly are often blurred, the composition is sometimes off-centre. The frequency and depth of blacks deepen the images, giving them a power of abstraction. For the first time in 1958, a selection of 84 black and white photographs was published by Robert Delpire ... in general indifference. Deemed sad, perverse, even subversive at the time, the book gradually became a classic of photography. 60 years after its first publication, the work, still very current, reappears in an edition revised and corrected by Robert Frank himself. Cover, format, paper and processing of the photographs have been modified and are closer to the American edition. The preface by Jack Kérouac benefits from a new translation by Brice Matthieussent.

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