Though Frank continued to be interested in film and video, he returned to still images in the 1970s, publishing his second photographic book, "The Lines of My Hand", in 1972. This work has been described as a "visual autobiography", and consists largely of personal photographs. However, he largely gave up "straight" photography to instead create narratives out of constructed images and collages, incorporating words and multiple frames of images that were directly scratched and distorted on the negatives. None of this later work has achieved an impact comparable to that of "The Americans." As some critics have pointed out, this is perhaps because Frank began playing with constructed images more than a decade after Robert Rauschenberg introduced his silkscreen composites—in contrast to "The Americans", Frank's later images simply were not beyond the pale of accepted technique and practice by that time.