Paris 33A 1949 - 1950

Robert Frank made this photographic work, "Paris 33A," without a date, and it's a contact sheet, a kind of behind-the-scenes look at the art-making process. It lays bare the artist's selections, his way of seeing, and how he hones in on the final image. The whole thing, the texture of the film, the sprocket holes, and the numbers, becomes part of the picture. There's a casualness here that feels very deliberate. You see the artist's hand in the marking of the number 33, scrawled right onto the film, which is like a painter's mark making. Look at the sequences of images, a street scene, a building repeated, and then the interior of a car. There's a narrative implied, but it’s up to us to fill in the blanks. The grittiness of Frank's work, the starkness, reminds me a little of some of Walker Evans' photography. But Frank takes it further, into a deeply personal, almost diaristic mode. It's less about capturing a perfect moment and more about the search itself.