Robert Frank - Paris - 2008

Welcome to the new auction by Anatole Desachy (France) and Ecki Heuser (Germany) taking place during Paris Photo fair 2026. To celebrate this 29th edition we have gathered the best of avant garde, modern & contemporary parisian photobooks. Enjoy this unique selection !

The publication of Paris: A Short Return marks 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. Having left Switzerland in 1924, this 1951 trip to France was only Frank's 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 reproduced here, which were selected by Frank and editor Ute Eskildsen, suggest that Frank's experience of the 'new world' had sharpened his eye for European urbanism. He saw the city's 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.