11th Street story 25 1951

Robert Frank’s “11th Street story 25” is a photographic contact sheet, a kind of behind-the-scenes look at the editing process. I can imagine Frank in his darkroom, hunched over, squinting at these tiny frames, trying to piece together a narrative. He’s got his grease pencil, marking frames, making decisions about what makes the cut. Look at the big number 25 scrawled across the middle – that’s Frank’s hand, deciding, selecting. It makes me think about Jasper Johns using stencils and numbers in his paintings – a similar kind of gesture. Frank is layering his mark-making on top of the images he's captured of 11th Street, creating a new kind of image that is both documentary and deeply personal. It’s like he’s saying, "Here's the world, but here's also me, wrestling with it, trying to make sense of it." And that’s what art’s all about, right? The world, and then you, wrestling with it.