London/Wales

by Robert Frank (Photographer)

"War is over; the heroic French population reaffirms superiority. Love, Paris, and Flowers but London was black, white, and gray, the elegance, the style, all present in front of always changing fog. Then I met a man from Wales talking about the Miners and I had read How Green Was My Valley . This became my only try to make a 'Story'." -- Robert Frank This magnificent new edition of London/Wales , which features never-before-seen photographs, juxtaposes Frank's images of the elegant world of London money with the grimy working-class world of postwar Wales--bankers opposite coal miners. It brings together two distinct bodies of work, and reveals a significant documentary precedent for The Americans. In also offers an important view of Frank's development, demonstrating an early interest in social commentary, in the narrative potential of photographic sequencing, and innovative use of the expressionistic qualities of the medium.

Genres: Photography, Nonfiction, Art

128 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Robert Frank (November 9, 1924 – September 9, 2019) was a Swiss American photographer and documentary filmmaker. His most notable work, the 1958 book titled The Americans, earned Frank comparisons to a modern-day de Tocqueville for his fresh and nuanced outsider's view of American society. Critic Sean O'Hagan, writing in The Guardian in 2014, said The Americans "changed the nature of photography, what it could say and how it could say it. [ ... ] it remains perhaps the most influential photography book of the 20th century." Frank later expanded into film and video and experimented with manipulating photographs and photomontage.

Reviews

[A · Rating 5 out of 5]

Robert Frank's photography books are not simply collections of his photographs. They are his personal reflections of what he is living and seeing at the moment. It is highly intuitive. In London/Wales, the images are juxtaposed with two excerpts from Richard Llewellyn's How Green was my Valley, plus a letter from Frank, Mary and Pablo to his parents. This brings Frank's life at that moment into sharper focus.

[Paul Secor · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great photographer can capture an image and stop time. When I look at some of Robert Frank's images, I have the sense that he's stopped time within time, if that makes any sense.

[Pat Loughery · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding documentary collection of Frank's look at postwar London and Welsh coal miners. This is haunting work by a master artist.

[Nat]

London in 1951 and 1952 looks like Beijing in the wintertime in 2013-2015, but with more bowler hats.

Note that 1952 was the year of London's "Great Smog": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog