A full and frank appraisal of the Americans (5/5)

Left is the cropping of the photo in the original Grove edition, much tighter and for no good reason.

I was lucky enough to be given a copy of The Americans as a birthday present in 1960 and it's always been one of my favorite photo books. Now, with this huge book, the original becomes even more fascinating and intriguing.

To be able to see Robert Frank's application to the Guggenheim, letters to Walker Evans and Jack Kerouac, a map and itinerary for the photo journey across America and his original working sequence of prints for the book put the eighty-three photos in perspective. Sarah Greenhough's four essays (she is one of the seven contributors) put him in the context of the Cold War and consumer culture times and I thought her essay about the opposition to The Americans particularly interesting (the Family of Man exhibition had a lot to answer for, though Frank had seven photos in it).

She also writes about various editions and the different printing techniques that were used. This turns out to be rather important because the viewer's perception of the photos can vary according to what copy they see. The original French and Grove Press editions were printed gravure and many of the photos were tightly cropped so that they were perceived as hard-edge images of America. Later editions, from Aperture (two) Pantheon, Scalo and Steidl sometimes used larger photos with less severe cropping. All of this is revealed in the back of the book with thumbnails of the original photos with repeats to show how the various editions presented their versions. The reality is that black and white prints cannot adequately be printed in one black pass through a press, to do it properly they have to be duotones or tritones. The Americans in this book look stunning as they are printed as tritones (probably from the same plates that Steidl used for a re-issue of The Americans in 2008).

The cherry on the cake for me with this book are the eighty-three pages of contact prints (done as duotones) with Frank's selection pulled out in the red grease crayon he used. How extraordinary to see alternate versions of photos that I've looked at over and over in the original book and to see more than 2500 negatives that he took in his travels.

Looking In is a remarkable (and beautifully produced) book that really does cover everything you'll need to know about a publishing event more than five decades ago.

BTW there is a paperback edition that does NOT include the contact prints, sequence and subsequent editions cropping pages, or the correspondence and archive material. It is 144 pages fewer than this expanded edition.