Walking Walking 2005

Robert Frank created this photograph, Walking Walking, sometime before his death in 2019. In it, a walking stick lies on a tiled floor, flanked by three square frames. I wonder what Frank was thinking, what he felt as he arranged these objects in the frame. There’s a loneliness here, a sparseness that reminds me of some of Agnes Martin’s grids, but messier. The walking stick is a prop – a found object, something real from the world. It grounds the image. The empty frames on the other hand could be windows or mirrors, ones you might look into. I appreciate that Frank’s practice was rooted in an embodied way of seeing. He picked up his camera, roamed the world, and pointed his lens at the world. There’s this tension between stillness and motion, between object and person, that resonates with me. As an artist, I find myself in dialogue with Frank and with many others across time, each of us seeking to capture a bit of life's ambiguity.