Paris 7B 1951 - 1952

Robert Frank made this gelatin silver print, Paris 7B, sometime in the middle of the last century, and what strikes me is how he makes use of accident and chance. The image is not a single photograph, but an arrangement of film strips, with all the sprocket holes and numbering still visible. Look at the big, scribbled number 7, scrawled right across the surface, disrupting the images beneath. It feels like the kind of mark you might make in haste, not really thinking about the consequences. That single gesture changes everything, opening the image up to a new set of possibilities. It's about the layering of different elements, the play between intention and accident, that reminds me a little of Rauschenberg's collages, although of course Frank is using photography rather than paint. The way images and gestures accumulate, so meaning becomes something multiple, unfixed, and always open to change.