After completing his seminal photography book The Americans in 1958, Robert Frank put aside the still image and concentrated throughout the 1960s on film-making. He only returned to still photography in the 1970s, using a Polaroid camera with black-and-white positive/negative film. These images were frequently layered with text, which Frank inscribed by hand onto the Polaroid negative. He found that these works allowed him more freedom to "destroy that image, that perfect image." In recent years Frank has worked almost exclusively with Polaroids, exploring the collage and assemblage possibilities of the instant photograph. Originally announced as Robert Polaroids , This slipcased collection of small, staple-bound books represents a new stage in the practice of a remarkable artist who continually challenges the limits of photography and film, and strives to avoid repeating himself. It brings together seven sequences of single new images compiled by Frank. As always, the photographs and stories relate Frank's life and milieu--his homes in Mabou and New York, for example, or trips to China and Spain.
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.