Robert Frank: Mabou

These colored Polaroids are the photographs Robert Frank is making now. Frank is best known for his seminal book, The Americans, which features 83 photographs selected from more than 28,000 taken on his legendary road trip across the United States. His Polaroids, however, are the antithesis of this sort of cumbersome editing process: Here, what you see is what you get. The title of these three small books in a slipcase– Mabou –simply reflects their content. These are images of the artist’s life at his home in Mabou, on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, Canada, where Frank has lived since 1971–sunlight falling across tools placed on a table, stacks of chopped wood, bookshelves, laughing guests, self-portraits.