We looked at Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans’ quite some time ago now but recently a few interesting reworkings of the original have appeared.
Photographer Mishka Henner created the cheekily titled ‘Less Americans‘ which, in his own words:
…is a remake of Robert Frank’s classic photobook, The Americans. Eighty-three new images have been created by digitally erasing most of the visual content from Frank’s photographs, leaving only solitary details from the originals. The sequencing remains faithful to Frank’s 2008 Steidl edition of the book whilst the design of the covers and title pages are influenced by the first Delpire edition printed in France in 1958.
Check out the video of the book below, it certainly reminds you just how much those images have become part of our memory, so much so that almost all are still easily recognizable.
And a thanks to Nathalie Belayche for bringing this one to my attention:
‘Sounds of The Americans‘ is an audio/photographic project created by Andrew Emond, in his own words:
Sounds of the Americans is an experiment in sound and photography using the contents of Robert Frank‘s photo book The Americans” as a foundation for exploration. The audio tracks are the result of converting the photographs to sound via computer software outlined below. Similarly, the images have been created by loading the sounds into a spectrograph application which allows one to recreate the original photographs in a highly altered form.
I find it fascinating, a complete breakdown and rebuilding of the images. Listening to the audio while watching the video is hypnotizing and you will quickly find yourself trying to guess how the pitch will change as the image is built up. I have embed one of the videos below but for best experience head over to the site itself.
– Matt