All editions sold out at the publisher! Robert Frank; Jack Kerouac: THE AMERICANS Steidl / National Gallery of Art 50th Anniversary Edition. Robert Frank’s The Americans changed the course of twentieth-century photography. In eighty-three photographs, 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 he also found novel areas of beauty in simple, overlooked corners of American life. And it was not just his subject matter – cars, jukeboxes, and even the road itself – that redefined the icons of America; it was also his seemingly intuitive, immediate, off-kilter style, as well as his method of brilliantly linking his photographs together thematically, conceptually, formally, and linguistically, that made The Americans so innovative. More of an ode or a poem than a literal document, the book is as powerful and provocative today as it was fifty-five years ago. Authors biography Robert Frank, born in Zurich in 1924, left Switzerland in 1947 and emigrated to the United States, a symbol of freedom. Disappointed by the omnipresent materialism, he returned to Europe in 1949. Many trips took him to South America, Spain, England and Paris. He returned to the United States in 1953, and obtained a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation to document American civilization. The result, published in 1958, would change the history of documentary photography and the vision of America.