Robert Frank
Drove across the United States in the mid-1950s and came back with the book that changed how America was photographed.
Robert Frank was born in Zurich in 1924, trained with commercial photographers there, and emigrated to New York in 1947, where he worked for Harper's Bazaar. A Guggenheim Fellowship in 1955 paid for a series of road trips across the country, and from more than twenty thousand frames he chose eighty-three for The Americans — published in Paris by Robert Delpire in 1958 and in New York the following year with an introduction by Jack Kerouac. Its jukeboxes, flags, funerals and segregated trolley passengers were received as an attack on the country, and it is now counted among the most influential photography books ever published. He turned to film with Pull My Daisy in 1959, settled in Nova Scotia, and died in 2019.
The date of the print is the first question. Prints of The Americans made in the 1950s and early 1960s, close to the negatives, are scarce and are the category most closely examined; Frank also made and signed a great many prints from the 1970s onwards, a number of them printed by assistants, and a later print of a famous image is a different object from a vintage one. Paper, tone, stamps and inscriptions on the verso are how the two are told apart. He also made unique later works combining several images, with words scratched into the negative, which are a separate field. The National Gallery of Art in Washington holds his archive of negatives and contact sheets.
If you own a work by Robert Frank
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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