Come again

Come again is a facsimile of a notebook of Polaroid collages that Robert Frank made from photographs taken in Beirut in 1991.

Frank went to Beirut that November on a commission to photograph the ruined city centre after the Lebanese civil war, which ran from 1975 to 1990. The commissioned work appeared in 1992 as Beirut City Centre from Editions du Cypres, alongside pictures by five other photographers. Frank also shot Polaroids of the city and its surroundings, put them away in his studio, and came back to them many years later to build the collages. Steidl published this reprint of the notebook in 2006 as a 48-page sewn softcover in a paper bag, printed with matt four-colour inks and a Polaroid varnish.

Frank (1924–2019) was born in Zurich and moved to the United States in 1947. Steidl notes that in the years before this book Frank worked almost exclusively with Polaroids, exploring what collage and assemblage could do with the instant photograph. He is best known for The Americans, first published in English in 1959.