Original hardbound first Steidl edition of The Americans, with photography by Robert Frank and introduction by Jack Kerouac.

• Book, dust jacket, and red 50th anniversary wrap-around band are all in excellent, like-new condition, bright, tight, and clean.



• The book is printed in oblong format and measures 19 x 21.5 cm [7½ in. x 8½ in.], with 180 pages and 83 black-and-white plates.



• Every single photo will hold your eye and evoke thoughtful contemplation. The images were captured by Frank during his travels across America in 1955 with a Guggenheim grant and a Leica. After putting the photos together he was not able to find a publisher in the United States. After its 1958 publication in France, it changed the course of twentieth-century photography.



• Frank returned to the photos to make this 2008 Steidl edition, where he worked closely with Gerhard Steidl at the press's Göttingen facility and oversaw the book's design, sequencing, and printing.



• This is the first Steidl edition, published in 2008 and printed in Germany. It has a protective Mylar cover and will be carefully packed with rigid corner guards; tracking included.



• Robert Frank's The Americans changed the course of twentieth-century photography. In 83 photographs, Frank looked beneath the surface of American life to reveal a people plagued by racism, ill-served by their politicians, and rendered numb by a rapidly expanding culture of consumption. Yet he also found novel areas of beauty in simple, overlooked corners of American life. And it was not just Frank's subject matter—cars, jukeboxes and even the road itself—that redefined the icons of America; it was also his seemingly intuitive, immediate, off-kilter style, as well as his method of brilliantly linking his photographs together thematically, conceptually, formally, and linguistically, that made The Americans so innovative. More of an ode or a poem than a literal document, the book is as powerful and provocative today as it was 68 years ago.



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