“This is for you. It is not much but I promised you a little story. Maybe this is not a story.” So begins Mary’s Book (1949), a love letter of sorts in the form of a handmade photobook that a 25-year-old Robert Frank made for his long-distance girlfriend and soon-to-be wife, Mary Lockspeiser. The young photographer was in Paris at the time, his first visit to Europe after moving to New York two years earlier from his native Switzerland. These pages were his first attempt at pairing words with his photographs.
Frank made Mary’s Book using six pages of stiff paper folded in half horizontally and nestled together, unbound. He pasted 74 photographs onto the pages, mostly small so that as many as ten could fit on a single page. Cursive handwritten notes, in English and French, punctuate the images. “The simplest things change if man comes into contact with them,” Frank scribbled in blue ink amid photographs of street lamps, posters and a circus tent. “Even a street urinal…”
Lockspeiser and Frank were married just six months after he made her this one-of-a-kind scrapbook. She treasured it for decades, long after she and Frank divorced and their two children tragically died. Recently gifted to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston by the photography dealer Howard Greenberg, the book will be displayed and reproduced in its entirety for the first time in an exhibition and accompanying publication. A selection of Frank’s photographs of Paris, on loan from his foundation, will also be on view in the exhibition, which is one of several marking the centenary of the photographer’s birth.
Robert Frank's Tulip/Paris (1950) from the Flowers in Paris series will also be on show © The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation; Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
“Paris became a permanent part of his psyche,” says the exhibition’s curator, Kristen Gresh. “He captured elements of the city with his poetic, insightful and inquisitive eye. Mary’s Book represents a formative moment early in Frank’s career as he is experimenting with text and image juxtaposition, a creative process that he used in his later photographic book making,” she says. “This visually poetic love poem became an important step in the development of Frank’s vision as a photographer, a film-maker and a book-maker.”
It would be another six years before Frank began the cross-country travels that resulted in his celebrated book The Americans (1958), but Mary’s Book and the other handmade photobooks he created early in his career (such as 40 Fotos and Peru) helped him hone his visual storytelling. In honour of Frank’s centenary, a new edition of The Americans was re-released by Aperture in October.
The centenary is also being marked at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which is hosting its first-ever solo exhibition dedicated to Frank (until 11 January 2025), including some never before exhibited works and a film installation composed of footage found after Frank’s death in 2019. Another solo show at Pace Gallery’s flagship New York outpost (until 21 December) focuses on Frank’s later work, and includes his 2004 autobiographical film True Story.
• Robert Frank: Mary’s Book, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 21 December-22 June 2025