“SEEING INTO DARK CORNERS, SLIPPING THROUGH THE CRACKS”

FRANK, Robert. Come Again. (Göttingen): Steidl, (2006). Slim quarto, original photographic self wrappers, stitched as issued, original photographic wraparound sleeve. $1700.

First edition, signed by Robert Frank on the title page, with 24 photographic plates (including one folding) of war-torn Beirut.

In November 1991, Robert Frank, along with five other photographers, was hired to photograph Beirut, a city devastated by civil war. In addition to his commissioned work, which appeared in Beirut City Centre (1992), Frank took numerous Polaroids of the ruined streets, collecting them in a notebook that he later stowed away in his home studio. For Come Again, Frank revisited that experience, supervising this distinctive publication of those once forgotten images in a "facsimile reprint of the notebook" he kept in Beirut. Printed on thick coated stack using four-color matte inks and Polaroid varnish, "Frank's Polaroid collages lend his pages the texture of memory; the crumbling, deserted Mediterranean buildings, shorn of roofs and pockmarked by bullet holes, speak of untold apocalypses" (Village Voice). In Come Again, as in his revolutionary work, Les Americains (1958), Frank's camera continues to be a "roving eye seeing into dark corners, slipping through the cracks" (Roth, 20). His is a vision that "makes photography, despite its inherent limitations, into a realm of allusion, indirection and suggestion" (New York Times). See Parr & Badger I:247.

A fine copy, quite scarce signed.