Robert Frank

The lesson: editing is half the work. After a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1955, Frank spent two years crossing the United States and shot more than 28,000 pictures, yet The Americans holds just 83 of them. The book came out in Paris in 1958 and from Grove Press in New York a year later. Read it in order rather than flipping through: subjects and moods recur from page to page, so the sequence says more than any single frame. Many of his pictures are tilted, grainy or blurred, which is a useful permission slip for anyone worried that a picture has to be technically clean to carry feeling. Then go through your own contact sheets and keep only the few that talk to each other.