Family--Wellfleet 10 1962

This is Robert Frank’s ‘Family—Wellfleet 10’, a photogram of film strips, printed in black and white. It’s a real dance with light and shadow, a process laid bare. The image is full of texture – the grain of the film, the grit of the beach, the rough edges of the strips themselves. It's far from slick, revealing the artist’s hand at every turn. The blacks are deep and pools, and the whites are stark. The sprocket holes of the film are clearly visible and become a sort of rhythm in the piece, like a musical score. The composition is almost brutally honest, with the film strips laid out like evidence. That repeated image of the truck cab really gets to me; its as if Frank were saying something about the constraints of family life. It’s a reminder that art is about seeing, feeling, and then showing, even when – or especially when – it's a little messy. You might also want to look at the photograms of artists like Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, who also experimented with the material qualities of photography.