Guggenheim 104/Americans 1--Hoboken, New Jersey 27 - 1955

Curator: Immediately I'm struck by the melancholy. Like flipping through an old scrapbook, catching glimpses of something just out of reach. Editor: Well said! What we have here is Robert Frank’s "Guggenheim 104/Americans 1--Hoboken, New Jersey", a gelatin-silver print made around 1955. It's one of his contact sheets, right? Almost like a visual diary from his cross-country journey for "The Americans". Curator: Exactly! The "Americans". Makes you think about who we were, who we thought we were, in the post-war haze. This particular sheet, though, it's like finding the poem hidden between the stanzas. It doesn't scream AMERICA! like some of the other iconic shots, it whispers. The small American flags hanging outside apartment windows, there are parades depicted in the strips as well.. But a feeling that it’s also somewhat detached. A record in some other, minor way. Editor: Interesting, because when I consider its form, the repetitive filmstrip pattern actually amplifies certain key motifs across multiple frames—the flags you noted but also architectural facades and processions. Curator: The faces especially; everyone looking off into the distance. I suppose I focus more on the mood created by how rough and unpolished it is—grainy, imperfect frames, even the handwritten numbers scrawled along the borders are striking—all part of Frank's unique vision, I believe. His desire for finding out what that unique vision might show. Editor: Indeed, the starkness emphasizes his departure from traditional documentary photography. There's a deconstruction, too, by presenting us not with the singular "perfect" image but the process itself, revealing the choices made and not made. I love your point about feeling. He captures everyday lives with an almost blunt simplicity that really resonates to this day, despite all our advancements and shifts in national spirit. Curator: Exactly! More a quiet study of an average day and an attempt to dissect something very universal. We don’t always want perfect, right? Maybe some of the best memories of the day hide inside these tiny imperfections and details, just barely exposed by time and change. I think Frank found a piece of it, or was getting there through documenting the feeling itself and offering new perspectives to the people he encountered and new ways to perceive what one feels through such connections. Editor: Precisely. So in turning back to where we started, it really isn't a scrapbook, as initially assumed, but something far more revealing. Curator: Revealing and incredibly unique. I wonder what someone seeing this will make of the same flags that can be found and purchased almost anywhere.