Delightful with Flawed Format

books:


	• Robert Frank: Paris Steidl, 2008 - 108 pages average customer review:based on 1 review view larger image
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Delightful with Flawed Format

I am never happy with photos that have one edge corresponding with the spine or that extend partially onto a facing page. Too much of the information is lost as the facing pages curve toward the spine.

This delightful ensemble of work would, I think, be better presented in a format so that all images have some border separating them from the spine and do not project into or extend beyond the spine.

Perhaps the horizontal and vertical dimensions of the book might be slightly larger in order to present these fine images with space around them. All the photos bleed to at least one edge of a page. I can get used to that, but cannot get used to a bleed to the spine or extension partially onto the facing page.

The presentation in the same publisher's current printing of "The Americans" is a much more satisfying visual experience. There is enough separation from the spine not to be objectionable, and all photos are each on a single page.

Even photos on facing pages, as there are in "Paris," would be no problem if there is enough separation from the spine.

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The publication of Paris 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.

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