Leon of Juda

The seventh in Robert Frank's private, book-length visual diaries, pairing images from across his career with the photographs he was still making in his eighties.

Leon of Juda interleaves still lifes shot inside Frank's Bleecker Street apartment in New York and landscapes around his house in Mabou, Nova Scotia. Informal portraits of friends and collaborators, his wife June Leaf, and found vintage postcards run alongside them. There is no caption or narrative thread; Frank's loose, non-chronological sequencing gives the fifty-two page book the texture of a personal scrapbook rather than a survey. Steidl published it in October 2017 as a softcover volume housed in a slipcase, continuing the diaristic, hand-assembled form Frank had been developing with the press since the early 2000s.

Frank (1924-2019) was the Swiss-born photographer whose The Americans reshaped postwar documentary photography. He spent his final decades working almost entirely in this album format, treating the book itself as the site of the work rather than a record of it. Leon of Juda sits alongside other late Steidl diaries such as Household Inventory Record and Tal Uf, Tal Ab. The same domestic and Nova Scotia material recurs across them, reworked and re-sequenced from one volume to the next.