Les Américains, 1958

Delpire, Paris, 1958.

First edition. Signed clearly on title-page. A tiny bit of rubbing, rear fore-edge corner with slight scratching, otherwise a fine copy. Frank very rarely signed any of his books. A signed first edition in excellent condition as here is exceedingly rare. One of the most celebrated photo-books of all time and a landmark publication.

Cover drawings by Saul Steinberg. Texts by Alain Bosquet, Simone de Beauvoir, Erskine Caldwell, John Dos Passos, Henry Miller, William Faulkner, John Seinbeck and others. Robert Frank spent most of the late 1950s making “a number of short trips out from New York and one long (nine-month) journey to the West Coast in a 1950 Ford to photograph America. From the more than 20,000 images that resulted, Frank eventually chose 83 of them and arranged them into four chapters. ‘With these photographs,’ he later wrote, ‘I have attempted to show a cross-section of the American population. My effort was to express it simply and without confusion. The view is personal.’ Such a simple intention for a book that would so alter the course of modern photography” (Andrew Roth, The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century).