Photography After Frank, The Book

I discovered, while looking up Jessica Lange's photography credentials on the Aperture website for my post about her show at the George Eastman House (here), that Philip Gefter -- a photo editor I used to work with at The New York Times -- has a new book out called Photography After Frank. It was published by Aperture last month.

I reconnected -- he, too, has left the Times -- and now I have a copy of the book.

Philip also wrote about photography for the Times, and you'll find many of those essays as well as new material in the book. Frank's 1959 book The Americans -- described by the National Gallery of Art for its recent exhibit Looking In: Robert Frank's The Americans -- "looked beneath the surface of American life to reveal a profound sense of alienation, angst, and loneliness" and was a turning point in photography. To refresh us on why, Philip writes:

Frank's pictures reflect the stream-of-consciousness art-making of the period, and his attempt to capture the experience of an authentic moment in visual terms established a departure from the traditional photographic imagery that preceded him. The immediacy, sponaneity, and compositional anarchy in his picture frame changed expectations about the photograph. 

From there, Philip divides his writings into themes, creating sections on The Document, The Staged Document, Photojournalism, The Portrait, The Collection and The Marketplace.