In the first week of April, the three major auction houses in New York managed to post over $30 million in photography sales, showing that the photography as collectible market is thriving, to say the least. The houses posted a record-setting week as almost every auction blew away projected sale prices. Read more…

Over the last month we’ve featured two re-interpretations of Robert Frank’s classic photo book “The Americans” — one controversial and minimalistic, another analytical. And now we bring you a third, very different, auditory take on Frank’s classic work.

Photographer Andrew Emond‘s Sounds of the Americans is a re-interpretation of The Americans using sound. By using a specialized software to convert all 83 images into audio, and then using a spectrograph to take that audio and re-create the original image, Emond’s work sheds an entirely different light on iconic pictures we’ve all become very familiar with. Read more…

We live in an analytical time, where most of the information we receive — be it about the stock market or the presidency — comes in way of charts, graphs, and other visual representations of hard (or sometimes soft) data. And it’s this dependency on analysis that Sherwin Tibayan’s diagnostic take on Robert Frank’s “The Americans” — the second “The Americans” spin off we’ve seen in two weeks — focuses on.
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Many consider Robert Frank’s classic photobook “The Americans” (originally published in France as “Les Américains”) to be one of the greatest photobooks of all time. Knowing this, Mishka Henner should have probably thought twice before using it as the subject of one of his forays into digital appropriation and, in this case, erasure. Read more…

Being stopped by police for being suspicious — and having cameras — isn’t an issue unique to our time. In 1955, photographer Robert Frank was driving through Arkansas when he was stopped by a police officer who looked into his car and noticed, among other things, “a number of cameras”. The officer had something to take care of in a nearby city, so he conveniently had Frank held in a city jail until he could return and question him.
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