Robert Frank

Widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in the history of his medium, Robert Frank broke new ground with his candid, poignant images of American life in the mid-20th century. Published on the occasion of the exhibition at Pace in New York, and in celebration of the centennial of Frank’s birth, Robert Frank: Hope Makes Visions presents an in-depth look at the photographer and filmmaker’s process across various media. Through a selection of his lesser-known photographs, collages, sketches and maquettes from 1955 to 2016, a new portrait of the artist emerges, one that shows his commitment to growth and experimentation throughout his career. With a new text by Ocean Vuong, author of the award-winning On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019), this volume is a sensitive homage to a canonical artist.
Robert Frank was born in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1924. He spent most of his adult life living between New York City and Nova Scotia, Canada, where he died in 2019. Frank was a photographer and filmmaker best known for his groundbreaking monograph The Americans (1958). Over his decades-long career, Frank captured the complexities of contemporary life with a distinct style and poetic insight.

Originally released in 2009, Seven Stories was the first publication of Robert Frank’s Polaroids. Quickly sold-out, it has been a collector’s rarity ever since. This 2024 edition makes the book available again at long last, shepherding his extraordinary series to a whole new audience.
After completing The Americans, Frank put aside the still image and concentrated throughout the 1960s on filmmaking. He returned to still photography only in the 1970s, using a Polaroid camera with black-and-white positive/negative film. In recent years, Frank worked almost exclusively with Polaroids, exploring the collage and assemblage possibilities of the instant photograph.
This slipcased collection of small, staple-bound books represents a new stage in the practice of a remarkable artist who continually challenged the limits of photography and film and strove to avoid repeating himself. As always, the photographs and stories relate to Frank’s life and milieu, his homes in Mabou and New York and his travels, including trips to China and Spain.

After The Americans (1958), The Lines of My Hand is arguably Robert Frank’s most important book, and without a doubt the publication that established his autobiographical, sometimes confessional approach to bookmaking. The book was originally published by Yugensha in Tokyo in 1972, and this reprint of the 2017 Steidl edition—made in close collaboration with Robert Frank—follows and updates the first US edition by Lustrum Press of 1972.
The Lines of My Hand is structured chronologically and presents selections from every stage of Frank’s work until 1972—from early photos in Switzerland in 1945–46 to images of his travels in Peru, Paris, Valencia, London and Wales and contact sheets from his 1955–56 journey through the US that resulted in The Americans and launched him into fame. Here too are intimate photos of Frank’s young family, later photo-collages and stills from films including Pull My Daisy (1959) and About Me: A Musical (1971). The structure of the book mirrors the rhythm of Frank’s life, and his short personal texts, such as diary entries, bring his voice into the book.
In its singular combination of text and image, its fearless self-reflection and its insistence on photography and film as equal yet different parts of his art, The Lines of My Hand proved an inspiration for many photographers—not least Robert Frank himself, who expanded this approach in his visual diaries of 2010–17.

The Visual Diaries presents, for the first time together, the six introspective volumes that are most critical to Robert Frank’s late bookmaking practice. Originally published between 2010 and 2017, the books imaginatively combine iconic photos from Frank’s early career with the more private pictures he made in later life. Black-and-white photos taken on 35mm film, including some from The Americans, mix with contemporary Polaroids. Quiet still lifes, contemplative landscapes and urban scenes, self-portraits, and spontaneous endearing shots of friends, colleagues and his wife, June Leaf, show the life he lived in their homes on Bleecker Street in New York and in Mabou, Nova Scotia. With these images Frank created seemingly casual layouts that recall the look and spirit of a private album or scrapbook and comment on memory and the passage of time. Factual captions and short, sometimes cryptic texts are scattered throughout the books. Frank’s highly personal approach to these books suggests how the past tempered his present and shows how his life was not just documented but shaped by bookmaking. Until his death in 2019, Robert Frank remained as innovative and ambitious as ever; Visual Diaries is the primary expression of his steadfast artistic curiosity.

The Polaroid camera, with its unique prints, was one of Robert Frank’s (1924–2019) favorite ways of making photographs. Red Table, Green Tree and From the Window, by the Window are three volumes of rarely or unseen original Polaroid and Fuji Instax facsimiles. Volume one, Red Table, includes images of a small red table Frank found in an antique shop in New Glasgow. The table found its place in the vestibule of the home Frank shared with his wife, artist June Leaf, in Mabou, Nova Scotia. He photographed it multiple times, in different light conditions and with ever-changing objects on its surface. Volume two, Green Tree, presents photographs of the landscape, specifically trees, with their myriad foliage throughout the seasons. Volume three, From the Window, by the Window, contains views from various windows around Frank’s Mabou home, with the focus shifting between the distant sea and the souvenirs he loved to collect. Organized by A-chan, who worked closely with Frank on his later books with Steidl, the instant prints are sorted in albums purchased from a drugstore. Frank and A-chan used these albums as a way to categorize his works, a system Frank incorporated throughout his career.

This edition of Hold Still, Keep Going is the second reprint of the catalog to Robert Frank’s 2001 exhibition of the same name at Museum Folkwang in Essen. Although the artist is best known for his seminal photobook The Americans (1958) and his experimental film Pull My Daisy (1959), until this publication, little scholarship existed on the intersection between Frank’s work in the disciplines of photography and film. Hold Still, Keep Going fills that void, exploring the role of film in Frank’s work and the interaction between the still and moving image that engaged him since the late 1950s. Adopting a nonchronological approach, the volume blends together photographs, film stills, 35mm filmstrips and photo-montages, presenting his most famous series alongside lesser-known work. From these varied contents, the volume offers revealing juxtapositions, rendering more cohesive the seemingly disjointed arc of Frank’s oeuvre. Text—from handwritten phrases on photographs (of which “Hold Still, Keep Going” is one example) to the dialogue in his films—emerges as a crucial tool, one also central to Frank’s visual diaries which comprised his later experiments in bookmaking.
Including texts from scholar Wolfgang Beilenhoff and author Christoph Ribbat, Hold Still, Keep Going provides insight into the relatively obscure work by perhaps one of history’s best-known photographers.

This volume, published in conjunction with the artist’s first solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, provides new insights into the interdisciplinary and lesser-known aspects of Robert Frank’s expansive career. The exhibition explores the six decades that followed his landmark photobook The Americans, a period in which Frank maintained an extraordinarily multifaceted practice characterized by perpetual experimentation across mediums and artistic and personal dialogues with other artists and with his communities. Coinciding with the centennial of his birth, this catalog takes its name from the artist’s poignant 1980 film, Life Dances On, in which Frank reflects on the individuals who have shaped his outlook.
The lushly illustrated publication features photographs, films, books and archival materials, layered with quotes from Frank on his influences and process. Three scholarly essays, excerpts from previously unpublished video footage and a rich visual chronology together explore Frank’s ceaseless creative exploration and observation of life.
Robert Frank was a Swiss American photographer and filmmaker best known for his groundbreaking monograph The Americans (1958). Over his decades-long career, Frank captured the complexities of contemporary life with a distinct style and poetic insight. He lived between New York City and Nova Scotia, Canada.

In the midst of an extended road trip across the United States, Robert Frank turned from bustling Canal Street, New Orleans, where crowds of people swarmed the sidewalks, pointed his camera lens at a passing trolley, and clicked the shutter. That single exposure produced a picture with enduring clarity: a row of windows framing the street car’s passengers—white passengers in the front, black passengers in the back.

Frank captured individual faces gazing from each rectangular frame, from the weary Black man in his work shirt to the young white girl just in front of him, her hand resting on the wooden sign that designated areas segregated by race. In 1958, he wrote: “With these photographs, I have attempted to show a cross-section of the American population. My effort was to express it simply and without confusion.” By the time The Americans was published in the United States in 1959, with this image now appearing on its front cover, New Orleans streetcars and buses had been desegregated through a 1958 court order. But Jim Crow was still in full swing, the 1960s Civil Rights struggles still ahead. An essay by MoMA curator Lucy Gallun conveys how this image reverberates in new contexts today.

Exploring Robert Frank’s rich bookmaking history with Steidl, and featuring spreads and explanatory texts from the more than 30 books that Frank published with Steidl, along with interviews, essays and documentary photos, Books and Films, 1947–2019 is a tribute to Frank’s diverse and influential bookmaking practice.

Gerhard Steidl began working with Robert Frank in 1989, when Swiss publisher Walter Keller asked him to print Frank’s The Lines of My Hand for his imprint Scalo: “You’ll both get along well on press,” Keller had said. And so Robert Frank traveled to Steidl at Düstere Strasse 4 in Göttingen for the first of many visits, to be on press and sign off each printed sheet.

After Scalo closed its doors in 2004, Steidl started to publish as well as print Frank’s books, beginning a long-term working friendship that encompassed every aspect of Frank’s creativity—from reprints of his classic and some lesser-known books (The Americans, Zero Mostel Reads a Book) and the publication of previously unseen projects (Seven Stories) to newly conceived volumes (Tal Uf Tal Ab, Good Days Quiet), as well as his complete films on DVD (Film Works).

In Gerhard Steidl’s words: “Our aim has been to ensure the legacy of this original and seminal artist and that his work will be available and accessible for years to come—all in a form and to a standard that Robert personally oversaw.”

In this, Robert Frank’s newest book, he both acknowledges and moves beyond his acclaimed visual diaries (2010–17), which juxtapose iconic photos from throughout his career with the more personal pictures he makes today and suggestive, often autobiographical text fragments. In Good days quiet Frank’s focus is life inside and outside his beloved weather-beaten wooden house in Mabou, where he has spent summers for decades with his wife June Leaf.

Among portraits of Leaf, Allen Ginsberg and Frank’s son are images of the house’s simple interior with its wood-fueled iron stove, humble furniture and bare light bulbs, and views of the land and sea by the house: snow-covered, windswept, stormy or lit by the dying sun.

Frank’s Polaroid prints show various deliberate states of deterioration and manipulation at his hands, including texts that move from the merely descriptive (“watching the crows”) to the emotive (“memories,” “grey sea—old house / can you hear the music”). As always in Frank’s books, his message lies primarily in the photos’ lyrical sequence, an influential approach to the photobook pioneered by and today well at home in his 94-year-old hands.

Robert Frank was born in Zurich in 1924 and immigrated to the United States in 1947. He is best known for his seminal book The Americans, first published in English in 1959, which gave rise to a distinctly new form of the photobook, and his experimental film Pull My Daisy (1959). Frank’s other important projects include the books Black White and Things (1954), The Lines of My Hand (1972) and the film Cocksucker Blues for the Rolling Stones (1972). He divides his time between New York City and Nova Scotia, Canada.

This magnificent edition of London/Wales—a reprint of the 2007 Steidl edition that included never-before-seen photographs, expanding on Scalo's first edition of 2003—juxtaposes Frank's images of the elegant world of London money with the grimy working-class world of postwar Wales. It brings together two distinct bodies of work, and reveals a significant documentary precedent for The Americans. It also offers an important view of Frank's development, demonstrating an early interest in social commentary, in the narrative potential of photographic sequencing, and innovative use of the expressionistic qualities of the medium.

The book was originally published by Yugensha in Tokyo in 1972, and this new Steidl edition, made in close collaboration with Frank, follows and updates the first US edition by Lustrum Press of 1972.

The Lines of My Hand is structured chronologically and presents selections from every stage of Frank’s work until 1972—from early photos in Switzerland in 1945–46, to images of his travels in Peru, Paris, Valencia, London and Wales, and to contact sheets from his 1955–56 journey through the US that resulted in The Americans. Here too are intimate photos of Frank’s young family, later photo-collages and stills from films including Pull My Daisy and About Me: A Musical.

Here, still lifes taken in Frank’s home in Bleecker Street, New York, and landscapes around his house in Mabou, Nova Scotia, jostle alongside spontaneous portraits of friends, colleagues and his wife, the artist June Leaf, as well as vintage postcards. With these images Frank creates a seemingly casual layout that recalls the look and spirit of a private album or scrapbook.

Equally humble and ambitious, Leon of Juda shows how the past tempers Frank’s present and how his life is not only documented in, but shaped by, bookmaking.

The significance of Robert Frank’s photography is unquestionable. His The Americans is arguably the most important American photography publication of the postwar period, and his work has spawned numerous disciples, as well as a rich critical literature. It is less known that at the very moment he became a star—the end of the 1950s—Frank chose to abandon still photography for more than ten years in order to immerse himself in filmmaking. He did return to photography in the 1970s, but Frank the filmmaker has remained a well-kept secret for almost four decades. A compilation examining his missing years is long overdue. Film Works includes four DVDs in PAL and NTSC format, and comes with the book Frank Films (edited by Brigitta Burger-Utzer and Stefan Grissemann)—offering a visually unique approach to Frank’s films—and the booklets Me & My Brother and Pull My Daisy, all packaged in a custom-made wooden case. This elaborate object provides a comprehensive overview of more than 25 films and videos, some of them classics of the New American Cinema of the 1950s and 1960s.

Digital Mastering by Assemblage Inc./Laura Israel.

Robert Frank was born in Zurich in 1924 and immigrated to the United States in 1947. He is best known for his seminal book The Americans, first published in 1958, which gave rise to a distinctly new form of the photobook, and his experimental film Pull My Daisy (1959). Frank’s other important projects include the books Black, White and Things (1952), The Lines of My Hand (1972) and the film Cocksucker Blues for the Rolling Stones (1972). He divides his time between New York City and Nova Scotia, Canada.