Presents the author's view of contemporary photography in the United States from the 1950s with the work of Robert Frank to the present day. 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 Frank also found novel areas of beauty in simple, overlooked corners of American life. His subject matter--cars, jukeboxes and even "the road" itself-- redefined the icons of America.

From the author of the acclaimed James Brown biography The One comes the first in-depth biography of renowned photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank, best known for his landmark book The Americans. As well-known as Robert Frank the photographer is, few can say they really know Robert Frank the man. Born and raised in wartime Switzerland, Frank discovered the power and allure of photography at an early age and quickly learned that the art meant significantly more to him than the money, success, or fame. The art was all, and he intended to spend a lifetime pursuing it. American Witness is the first comprehensive look at the life of a man who's as mysterious and evasive as he is prolific and gifted. Leaving his rigid Switzerland for the more fluid United States in 1947, Frank found himself at the red-hot social center of bohemian New York in the '50s and '60s, becoming friends with everyone from Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Peter Orlovsky to photographer Walker Evans, actor Zero Mostel, painter Willem de Kooning, filmmaker Jonas Mekas, Bob Dylan, writer Rudy Wirlitzer, jazz musicians Ornette Coleman and Charles Mingus, and more. Frank roamed the country with his young family, taking roughly 27,000 photographs and collecting 83 of them into what is still his most famous work: The Americans. His was an America nobody had seen before, and if it was harshly criticized upon publication for its portrait of a divided country, the collection gradually grew to be recognized as a transformative American vision. And then he turned his back on certain success, giving up photography to reinvent himself as a film and video maker. Frank helped found the American independent cinema of the 1960s and made a legendary film with the Rolling Stones. Today, the nonagenarian is an embodiment of restless creativity and a symbol of what it costs to remain original in America, his life defined by never repeating himself, never being satisfied. American Witness is a portrait of a singular artist and the country that he saw.

Edited and text by Sarah Greenough. Additional text by Anne Tucker, Stuart Alexander, Martin Gasser, Jeff Rosenheim, Michel Frizot, Luc Sante, Philip Brookman.

These colored Polaroids are the photographs Robert Frank is making now. Frank is best known for his seminal book, The Americans, which features 83 photographs selected from more than 28,000 taken on his legendary road trip across the United States. His Polaroids, however, are the antithesis of this sort of cumbersome editing process: Here, what you see is what you get. The title of these three small books in a slipcase--Mabou--simply reflects their content. These are images of the artist's life at his home in Mabou, on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, Canada, where Frank has lived since 1971--sunlight falling across tools placed on a table, stacks of chopped wood, bookshelves, laughing guests, self-portraits.

"Originally published to coincide with Robert Frank's exhibition HOLD STILL_keep going at Germany's Museum Folkwang, Essen, in 2001, this book explores the filmic aspects of Frank's photography. The interaction between the still and moving image permeates Frank's oeuvre, from his early still photographs, to his concentration on filmmaking in the 1960s and his use of both thereafter. Adopting a non-chronological approach that juxtaposes work from a career spanning more than 60 years, this volume collects prints, film stills and collages, as well as sequences of still photography arranged like fragments from films. Frank's use of text is also crucial, both in his films (in the form of scripted and improvised dialogue), and through words handwritten on the photographs"---www.amazon.com.

Paris A Short Return is the first time that the significant body of photographs which Robert Frank made in Paris in the early 1950s have been brought together in a single book. His visit to Paris in 1951 was his second return to Europe after he had settled in New York City in 1947 and some of the images he made during that visit have become iconic in the history of the medium. The 80 photographs selected by Robert Frank and Ute Eskildsen suggest that Franks experience of the new world had sharpened his eye for European urbanism. He saw the citys streets as a stage for human activity and focused particularly on the flower sellers. His work clearly references Atget and invokes the tradition of the flaneur. Robert Frank was born in Zurich, Switzerland in 1924 and went 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 distinct new art form in the photo-book, and his experimental film Pull My Daisy, made in 1959. His other important projects include the book Black White and Things, 1954, the book The Lines of My Hand, 1959, and the film Cocksucker Blues, 1972. He divides his time between New York City and Nova Scotia, Canada.