Wales 1 1953

Robert Frank's "Wales 1" is a photographic contact sheet, a collection of moments caught on film. It's a process laid bare, showing us the before and after, the takes and outtakes. The grainy blacks and whites, the sequencing—it's all about the physicality of the medium. Look at the smudges, the red marker. These aren’t mistakes; they’re part of the story. Each strip of film offers a narrative, but not a clear one. The images flicker between landscapes, interiors, portraits, and abstraction. A horse in a field, a crowded table, a blank frame marked with a big red zero. That zero, sitting there amidst the captured images, feels like a punchline, or a question. It reminds me of Rauschenberg erasing De Kooning—what does it mean to negate an image, to start over? Like the work of Gerhard Richter, Frank's work embraces this ambiguity, showing us that art is not about answers, but about the questions we ask.