Looking In: Robert Frank's The Americans

Looking In: Robert Frank's The Americans is the catalogue built for the exhibition marking the fiftieth anniversary of The Americans, and it is as much about how Frank made the book as about the pictures themselves.

Sarah Greenough, senior curator of photographs at the National Gallery of Art, edited the book. The National Gallery of Art and Steidl published it in 2009 as a 528-page expanded hardcover. It reproduces the original eighty-three photographs from The Americans alongside contact sheets, work prints, and correspondence from Frank's 1955-56 Guggenheim-funded road trip. Together they trace how he selected and sequenced the book from thousands of exposures. Essays by Greenough, Jeff L. Rosenheim, Anne Wilkes Tucker, Stuart Alexander, Martin Gasser, Michel Frizot, Luc Sante, and Philip Brookman examine Frank's early career as a magazine photographer. They also cover his relationships with Walker Evans and Edward Steichen, and the roots of the book in earlier European and American photobooks. The accompanying exhibition traveled from the National Gallery of Art to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2009 and 2010.

The Americans was first published in France in 1958 and in the United States in 1959. It remains one of the most influential photobooks of the twentieth century. Looking In won the Association of Art Museum Curators' award for Outstanding Museum Catalogue and the International Center of Photography's Infinity Award for Publications.