Robert Frank’s “keepers”

Chair at Abandoned Factory. Boulder County, Colorado, 2012

One year, 760 rolls of film, over 27,000 photographs.Want to guess how many “keepers”?

83 (That’s eighty-three!)

The photographer was Robert Frank, back in 1955-1956. Those 83 carefully selected prints were published in the classic volume, The Americans (Les Américains), in 1958 and 1960. The photographs from this masterwork (and much more) were exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art in 2009 and you can read an excellent and very complete review of this exhibition in the September 14, 2009 issue of The New Yorker here.

27,000 shutter actuations and only 83 made the final cut. How does that make you feel? I know how it makes me feel!

So, as I see it, here is the moral of the story in triptych:

1) Quality takes time and effort.

2) It’s easy to make a photograph (just press the button); so much harder to make a good one.

3) Edit your images ruthlessly!