Guggenheim 474/Lines of My Hand 65--Twentieth Century Fox film studio, Burbank, California 1956

This is Robert Frank's "Guggenheim 474/Lines of My Hand 65--Twentieth Century Fox film studio, Burbank, California," a gelatin silver print mounted on paper. Looking at the range of grays, from almost velvety blacks to bright highlights, it feels like Frank is showing us the nuts and bolts of image-making itself. The surface has a tactile quality, you can see the grain and texture, which makes it feel immediate and unprocessed, like he's just pulling back the curtain. I like the way the movie sets are pictured. It reminds me of when I look at the back of a painting, all of its stretchers and staples and mess. It gives you a glimpse of the workings behind the illusion. Take that bottom right corner, for instance. The arrow points insistently towards an image of a lightbulb. It's kind of funny, because the lightbulb is a cliche for an idea. Here Frank is pointing, very wryly, at the very stuff of ideas, literally and figuratively. I guess you could compare his sensibility to someone like Garry Winogrand, who was similarly interested in the poetics of the everyday. For Frank, art feels like a process of thinking, of feeling, and of endlessly looking, rather than something fixed.