Guggenheim 472--Twentieth Century Fox film studio, Burbank, California 1956

Robert Frank made this contact sheet from photographs taken at the Twentieth Century Fox film studio in Burbank, California. Looking at the images lined up on the film strip, I imagine Frank moving around the set, drawn to the cinematic illusion-making. The images give you this sense of movement, his eye searching, selecting, framing. There is a real contrast between what he chooses to isolate and what appears as the reality of the film production. I wonder what he was thinking when he made the pictures? Was he looking for something true amidst all this fabrication? How can you find reality in the artifice of the film industry? I feel that. I think he did too. The work feels like an invitation, something to contemplate. Like much art, it embraces ambiguity, offering no easy answers, but instead, encouraging questions and new ways of seeing.