Funeral--New York City no number 1955

This is Robert Frank’s contact sheet, “Funeral—New York City no number." It’s photographic, of course, but it’s also fundamentally about darkroom practice, and the way an image emerges from its latent state. Here we see a series of frames, glimpses of a funeral procession. The effect is raw and immediate, characteristic of Frank’s approach. The high contrast and graininess, a product of his choice of film and development techniques, imbue the scene with a gritty realism. You can see the car and the people involved in the procession. But the contact sheet isn’t the finished work of art. It is a record of Frank’s labor, as he sifts through images, looking for the right shot. By presenting the contact sheet itself, Frank acknowledges the means of production. It challenges the traditional notion of the decisive moment, and invites us to consider the broader context of photographic practice. It is a democratic, demystified approach to image-making. The work is not just the final print, but the entire process itself.