Lot Essay
This is not a classic photographer's contact sheet that records the contents of one roll of film. Each of the seven negative strips from separate rolls of film includes one image that was published in Frank's landmark book The Americans. The strips are arranged in apparently random order, differing from the sequence of the book. This enlarged contact sheet was made sometime between 1968 and the mid-1970s, while Frank's printer Sid Kaplan had access to an 8x10 enlarger. Enlarged contact prints of The Americans images are very rare and exist from only two other printing sessions, one apparently in the 1960s and the other in Rochester, New York in 1971 while Frank was teaching a class at the Visual Studies Workshop.