Guggenheim 682--Salt Lake City, Utah 1956

This is Robert Frank's "Guggenheim 682--Salt Lake City, Utah", a black and white photograph that's all about the film strip itself. I’m really taken by the way Frank presents the raw material of his photography—it’s like he’s saying, “Here’s the evidence, the stuff that usually gets hidden.” It’s as if he's inviting us into the darkroom. The sequence of images, those little windows into Salt Lake City, they feel so intimate, yet detached. I imagine Frank, camera in hand, wandering, searching, and finding these small, fleeting moments. It’s about the act of seeing and recording, but also about what gets left out. It's like a painter leaving their underpainting visible, revealing the layers of process and decision-making. Frank, like all of us artists, is in conversation with his own medium, with the world, with the history of art. Each image is a little brushstroke in a bigger picture, a continuous back and forth between the artist and the world.