Streetcar--Transportation 1941 - 1945

Robert Frank made this photograph, using of course a camera, of a streetcar in, well, who knows when. It doesn’t really matter. Frank has this way of catching things off guard, like a street scene that's both totally there and just slipping away. It's a super grainy, contrast-y, image, all about the light and shadow doing a dance. It feels like Frank was dodging in and out of traffic, trying to grab a piece of the real world as it whizzed by. I wonder if he felt like an outsider with a camera, trying to make sense of it all. I always think of him as a kindred spirit, wrestling with the same stuff I do in my paintings. Like, how do you catch the feeling of a place, or a moment, without getting all fussy about it? His pictures, they’re like the visual equivalent of a gut feeling. He invites us to really look, and maybe even see a bit of ourselves in the everyday chaos.