"War is over; the heroic French population reaffirms superiority. Love, Paris, and Flowers but London was black, white, and gray, the elegance, the style, all present in front of always changing fog. Then I met a man from Wales talking about the Miners and I had read How Green Was My Valley. This became my only try to make a 'Story'." --Robert Frank This magnificent new edition of London/Wales, which features never-before-seen photographs, juxtaposes Frank's images of the elegant world of London money with the grimy working-class world of postwar Wales--bankers opposite coal miners. It brings together two distinct bodies of work, and reveals a significant documentary precedent for The Americans. In also offers an important view of Frank's development, demonstrating an early interest in social commentary, in the narrative potential of photographic sequencing, and innovative use of the expressionistic qualities of the medium.

A delightful moment of slapstick in Robert Frank's oeuvre The female subject absorbed in a book has prompted masterworks from Vermeer, Monet, Vuillard and Matisse, among many others. Less often portrayed are men in the act of reading--even Manet's portrait of Émile Zola depicts the writer staring away from his open volume. Is it the supposed passivity of this act that has discouraged men from modeling it? This mini-genre remains even less explored yet by photographers, though it surely offers the supreme opportunity for coaxing subjects of either sex into unself-consciousness, if not outright reverie. In Zero Mostel Reads a Book , Robert Frank takes a male comic actor for his subject but flouts the genre's quietist sobriety in every way possible. Mostel is depicted in cartoonish dimensions, bemused, baffled and apoplectic, as he makes his way through an unidentified hardback volume, while seated at a table or on a sofa in a large lounge area. First published in 1963 by The New York Times "for the fun of it" and a collector's item ever since, this lovely publication relates a series of theatrical and playful vignettes in which Mostel's most famous roles--Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof , Pseudolus in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and Max Bialystock in The Producers --are clearly signaled. It is a delightful moment of slapstick in the Frank oeuvre.