America and Other Myths: Photographs by Robert Frank and Todd Webb, 1955

Two photographers, Robert Frank and Todd Webb, were awarded grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation in 1955 to travel across the United States and photograph America. Their work is now being published in a book that compares and contrasts their two styles, highlighting the differences in their perspectives and approaches to the same subjects and places.

Format: Hardback
Length: 184 pages
Publication date: 10 October 2023
Publisher: Yale University Press

In the mid-twentieth century, two photographers, Robert Frank and Todd Webb, embarked on parallel projects to capture the essence of America. Both received grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation in 1955 to document their journeys across the United States. While Frank drove coast to coast, capturing the highways, bars, and people that would later form the basis of his widely acclaimed publication "The Americans" (1958), Webb walked across the country, seeking to capture "vanishing Americana" and the evolving landscape.

Unbeknownst to each other, the photographers produced strikingly similar images of the highway, parades, and dim, smoky barrooms. However, their styles were vastly different. Frank's grainy, off-kilter photographs revealed the inequities and complexities of American life, while Webb's carefully composed images embraced clear detail and celebrated the individual oddities of Americans and their locales.

This groundbreaking book is the first to publish Webb's 1955 photographs and brings together these parallel projects for the first time. It features more than one hundred images accompanied by text that explores the different perspectives and approaches of Frank and Webb to similar subjects and places. The book also delves into the contrasting receptions of Frank's iconic work and Webb's relatively unknown series, as well as the role of road trips in shaping American identity at midcentury.

Published in association with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the exhibition schedule for this captivating book includes stops at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (October 8, 2023–January 7, 2024), the Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts (February 10–July 30, 2024), and the Brandywine Museum of Art, Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania (February 8–May 4, 2025).

Weight: 1232g
Dimension: 263 x 281 x 23 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780300270891