Mental Floss is not a magazine I’ve come across before, but The Photographer Who Captured America’s Dark Side by Lucas Reilly which originally appeared in the January/February 2015 issue is a well-written introduction to the work of Robert Frank and his travels across the nation to take the pictures that became ‘The Americans’.
It doesn’t say a great deal about his actual work but does a good job in situating it, which is perhaps something that those who have only come across his work in more recent times needs saying. I’ve written so many times that ‘The Americans‘ is a book every photographer should have a well-thumbed copy of on her/his bookshelf that I feel sure that if you are reading this you already do, but if not, it is readily available in many editions – and although a copy of the first edition might cost you £10,000 you can buy more recent ones secondhand for a more sensible price – less than £20 if you look around. The various editions all differ slightly, but not enough to make a real difference; I think the best is perhaps still the Aperture version from the late 1970s, but that is now a little dear.
There is enough about Frank to keep you busy for a week or two on American Suburb X, but Mental Floss turns out to be something of a disappointment. In the middle of the Frank piece is a box reading ‘For more stories like this visit mentalfloss.com‘ but if you do you find yournself on a page of pretty average clickbait, fluff with little or no photographic interest linking to other web sites and blogs. Diligent wading through half a dozen pages of trash only yielded a single piece that enticed me at all, on a unique mansion for sale in Mile End, London.
Clicking on this was a little disappointing, as I’d already read a far better article At Malplaquet House on the same house some years back on Spitalfields Life, though the MF piece did link to its own inspiration, the more recent Mysterious 265-Year-Old Mansion in London Is Rediscovered and Being Sold for Millions by Kristine Mitchell published on June 18, 2016 on My Modern Met. I you have around £2,950,000 to spare it might be worth viewing.