(Via All Things Considered on NPR yesterday)
One of the greatest pieces of documentation of America turns 50 this year: Robert Frank's collection of photographs, "The Americans". Some of the best-known images from the much-praised book can be seen in this slideshow.
Lens Culture, a photography site/blog says the book "redefined what a photo book could be".
Frank's pictures get you thinking about what it must have meant to be an American in the 1950s and what it means to be one in the 21st century. (Look at the one titled "Parade - Hoboken, New Jersey". It's a sad and chilling picture.)
That fifty years later, these photographs still move us (and not just fill us with nostalgia for the Gilded Nineteen-fifties) is proof of the timelessness of Robert Frank's work.
Note: If you live in the DC area, the National Gallery of Art is holding a retrospective of Frank's work.
7 comments:
Thanks for posting this. Frank is one of my absolute, absolute favourite photographers and after H C-B, the one whose work I most look at for...I don't know what for, but whatever it is, I usually find.
SB: you might know this - are there any Indian photo-books like "The Americans"? (Contemporary, pre-independence or post-Independence?)
can't think of anything, ya. will let you know if something occurs to me.
KM:
Not Indians as whole, but there was this book about Parsis in India. Some lovely snaps in there.
??!: Thanks for that link. (Though I wonder - if a book singles out the Parsi community, does that, in some way, "exoticize" them?)
Unkelji, how much more can you exoticize a community that puts dried apricots in mutton dishes, and has surnames like Vaagchhipawala?
??!: Vaagchhipwala? That's a new one.
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