Guggenheim 748--Indianapolis 1956

Robert Frank made Guggenheim 748--Indianapolis using gelatin silver print. It's a matrix of negatives, like a page of contact sheets, the raw material from which images are chosen and printed. Looking at the images here, you might think of Gerhard Richter’s “48 Portraits,” or even those grids of mugshots you see in detective movies. Frank lays bare a process, where the artist is trying to get something, but doesn’t quite know what it is yet. I'm drawn to the strips where we see crowds of people, or maybe the same person, caught in slightly different poses, like a flip-book animation. The grey scale is very rich, and each tiny picture tells a story. Are they looking? Are they talking? The filmstrip's rigid structure makes the fleeting quality of the captured moments all the more poignant. It feels like a precursor to some of the stuff that people like Nan Goldin were doing later. Ultimately, it's about seeing and feeling in the world.