In March 1949, Robert Frank mailed a birthday gift to his mother in Switzerland: A maquette of a series of photographs he had made during a visit to Peru between June and December of the previous year. Frank assembled an identical book for himself, and these two maquettes now reside in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York and the National Gallery of Art, Washington. A few of the images are well known in Frank's oeuvre, but until now very few people have seen the entire series--which, in 1949, already displayed the hallmark of Frank's distinctive image-sequencing. Peru also exhibits an ease and flexibility that Frank himself confirms: "I was very free with the camera. I didn't think of what would be the correct thing to do; I did what I felt good doing. I was like an action painter." Using a hand-held 35mm Leica camera, Frank documented the country's massive vistas, weathered faces, manual labor and dusty roads stretching to the horizon with a spontaneity of motion that propels the viewer into the midst of the scenery. For the first time, and under the direction of Frank himself, this book presents the complete sequence of images. Peru is a work of major significance in both the artist's history and the history of photography. Published in association with the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Robert Frank was born in Zurich in 1924 to parents of Jewish descent. He immigrated to the United States two years after World War II ended, and since then he has produced work that changed the history of art and photography. Groundbreaking projects include The Americans, Lines of My Hand, Black White and Things, Pull My Daisy and Cocksucker Blues. Frank was the subject of a major retrospective organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, in 1994. He was the recipient of the Hasselblad Award in 1996. A major exhibition organized by The National Gallery of Art, Looking In: Robert Frank's "The Americans," will tour nationally in 2009, with stops in Washington, San Francisco and New York.