This book presents François-Marie Banier’s portraits of Moroccan construction workers sleeping or at rest in their places of work. Caught in moments of dreaming and escape from their labor, Banier’s subjects blend into the soft grey atmosphere of his pictures and seem, if but for a moment, to have escaped the harsher facts of reality. These are candid and tender portraits which continue Banier’s practice of photographing strangers he meets in small and large cities. In his words: “To photograph workers asleep on the very ground of their construction site was, once again, to follow the paradoxical lines of being, a solitude embodied in movie heroes who change faces, roles, centuries and sometimes genders, in each of their naps.”

It is not the dreamer’s spirit only that sleep inhabits. The body in a lying position aligns with the horizon and the dreams that travel across it. My capacity for tenderness overflows: life going to sleep flirts with abandonment, this elegance of any fighter, life being nothing but a battlefield. François-Marie Banier

Robert Frank's father, Henry, was both the proprietor of a bicycle shop in Zurich, and a keen amateur photographer. Father - Photographer makes public for the first time a selection of Henry Frank's photographs including landscapes, family portraits, still-lifes and cityscapes. When Robert Frank immigrated to the United States in 1947, a wooden box containing his father's stereophotographs was one of the few objects he brought with him. In 2008 that box and the fragile photographic glass plates within it were hand-escorted to Steidl in Goettingen, where they were scanned in tri-tone in preparation for this book. Designed by Robert Frank, Father - Photographer reveals Henry Frank to be both a talented photographer and a keen traveller. His pictures include snow-capped Alps and lakes in Switzerland, views of Venice, Pisa and Florence, and depictions of his family and friends including the young Robert. Henry Frank also reveals a passion for modern means of transport in images of aeroplanes, ships, hot-air balloons, and a car fair at the Grand Palais in Paris. Father - Photographer is a revelation of the unknown photographer Henry Frank, a historical photographic document of the early twentieth century, as well as a new chapter in Robert Frank's ongoing bookmaking.