Robert Frank's Photobooks

On the occasion of the exhibition Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue, join MoMA for a program focusing on Robert Frank’s approach to bookmaking over the six decades following his landmark publication The Americans. Frank returned multiple times to his autobiographical photobook The Lines of My Hand (first published in 1972), adding new works and resequencing images and words. During the last decade of his life, his artist’s books published by Steidl—which Frank called “visual diaries”—were his main artistic output, and a space in which he could explore new relationships between his photographs.

Life Dances On, Frank’s first solo exhibition at MoMA, provides a new consideration of his expansive body of work by exploring the vibrant and lesser-known years of his career following the 1958 completion of The Americans, up until his death in 2019. Coinciding with the centennial of Frank’s birth, on November 9, 2024, this exhibition explores Frank’s perpetual experimentation across mediums—from photography, to film, to books—and his artistic and personal dialogues with other artists and with his communities.

Introduced by exhibition curator Lucy Gallun, the program will feature Gerhard Steidl, Frank’s longtime bookmaking collaborator, followed by a response from writer, editor, and educator Catherine Taylor.