Over the course of his long life, Robert Frank reinvented his relationship with his work several times. The 2006 Steidl publication of Come Again documents Frank’s 1991 return to still photography, after years spent focused on documentary filmmaking. The fourteen-year delay between the making and the publication of the work was due to the scrapbook being lost in Frank’s studio.
Come Again is ostensibly a record, in Polaroids, of Beirut in 1991, when Frank visited the city to photograph it in the wake of the civil war. But for Frank, the photographs he made there marked a “turning over the stones” moment in his engagement with photography - an embrace of its materiality. Come Again captures a transitional phase in Frank’s practice that would resonate through his later work and shape how he approached his archive.
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