HOLD STILL – Keep Going

The second reprint of the landmark publication exploring the interaction between the still and moving image within Frank’s practice

This edition of Hold Still, Keep Going is the second reprint of the catalog to Robert Frank’s 2001 exhibition of the same name at Museum Folkwang in Essen. Although the artist is best known for his seminal photobook The Americans (1958) and his experimental film Pull My Daisy (1959), until this publication, little scholarship existed on the intersection between Frank’s work in the disciplines of photography and film. Hold Still, Keep Going fills that void, exploring the role of film in Frank’s work and the interaction between the still and moving image that engaged him since the late 1950s. Adopting a nonchronological approach, the volume blends together photographs, film stills, 35mm filmstrips and photo-montages, presenting his most famous series alongside lesser-known work. From these varied contents, the volume offers revealing juxtapositions, rendering more cohesive the seemingly disjointed arc of Frank’s oeuvre. Text—from handwritten phrases on photographs (of which “Hold Still, Keep Going” is one example) to the dialogue in his films—emerges as a crucial tool, one also central to Frank’s visual diaries which comprised his later experiments in bookmaking.
Including texts from scholar Wolfgang Beilenhoff and author Christoph Ribbat, Hold Still, Keep Going provides insight into the relatively obscure work by perhaps one of history’s best-known photographers.