Broadway no number 1957

Robert Frank's 'Broadway no number' is a photographic work pieced together from film strips; a raw, process-led construction. It’s like he's thumbing his nose at the idea of the perfect, singular image, instead giving us these grainy, jumpy sequences. The blacks are dense, swallowing detail, and the highlights flare out, almost blinding. It’s a stark contrast that emphasizes the immediacy of the shot. You can practically hear the whir of the motor drive, the click and advance. Look at the strip at the top – the way the car lights blur, the figures in the background becoming ghosts. I think of someone like Warhol, taking the slickness out of mass culture and spitting it back at us, only Frank does it with a kind of streetwise poetry. What do we see when we look at pictures, and how do we put them together in our heads to mean something? It's a question, not an answer.