Guggenheim 573--Los Angeles 1955 - 1956

This is Robert Frank's 'Guggenheim 573--Los Angeles', a photographic work made sometime in the mid to late 1950s. It's a series of black and white film strips layered on top of one another, showing an array of images from a woman in a bathtub to palm trees and a lone rider on horseback. I like to think about what it might have been like for Frank to construct these images; what he was thinking when he pressed the shutter. Maybe he was trying to capture the disparate elements of life in LA, the quiet domesticity alongside the vast landscapes. Photography and painting have a lot in common. Both are about light and shadow, composition, and capturing a moment in time. Frank reminds us that artists are in an ongoing conversation, an exchange of ideas that transcends time, and that ambiguity and uncertainty allow for multiple readings.