Wednesday, September 28, 2011

A Distinct and Intense Order

National Gallery of Art Curator Sarah Greenough talks about Robert Frank's iconic post-World War II book, The Americans in a video documenting the 2009 exhibition Looking In: Robert Frank's The Americans. Greenough and other scholars have looked intensely at "the sequence and structure" of the book that expressed a rhythm and at times Frank's own intuitive response using images of people looking or the American flag to "keep the beat" as poet Allen Ginsberg observed. The process of Frank's printmaking and maquette have been replaced today by online organizing tools such as Flickr and MagCloud and software such as Adobe's InDesign making bookmaking more accessible for artists and helping artists self-publish material that may have otherwise not been of interest to the mainstream press.