New York City 7 1960

This is Robert Frank’s “New York City 7”, a photo-contact sheet, a sequence of moments captured then printed as one. It’s less about a single image, and more about the feel of things developing, the image coming into focus. The materiality here is so direct, because this is what it looked like in the darkroom. I think about all the images Frank didn’t choose; this is a record of the process, the editing, the rejects. He’s showing us the back end, the stuff you don’t normally see. That row of men in hats looking out at the skyline...you can feel the grain of the photograph, the paper. The way the buildings behind them are soft and blurry. It’s like a memory; New York as a feeling, more than a place. I'm reminded of some of Gerhard Richter’s blurred paintings of cityscapes; these share a common interest in evoking a specific sense of place and time. Like Richter, Frank pushes his chosen medium in unexpected directions. It feels like a very contemporary way of seeing the world, as transient, and unfixed.