Pablo VII 1953

This is Robert Frank's photographic work sheet. I can imagine him in the darkroom, hunched over, his sleeves rolled up, squinting at the strips of negatives. The contrast is high. The images show a seated figure with someone leaning over them and a red arrow pointing towards the pair. I wonder, what’s going on in this scene? Is this Frank’s direction to himself? Is he trying to draw the viewer's eye in, to help us find something in the photo? There are strips of photographs of a woman, and photographs of interiors. The whole thing feels kind of gritty and real. He is saying something about the chaos of daily life. I know that photographers like Garry Winogrand also worked in series, so maybe Frank was thinking about how meaning emerges through repetition and variation. This photograph offers a space to see Frank as an artist who uses his materials to make something new from the raw stuff of everyday life.