Paris 12 1959

Robert Frank’s ‘Paris 12’ is a contact sheet, so it's photographic film pressed directly onto paper. You see everything – the good bits, the mistakes. Each frame offers a glimpse, a moment, but none of them tell the whole story. The black bars separate them, but they also tie them together. There is this sense of narrative, but what is so cool is that is disrupted, not linear. The images are grainy and raw, like a memory fading at the edges. This reminds me of how Cy Twombly would layer marks and text, creating these palimpsests of experience. Look at that strip near the middle, those blurry, dark shots. What were they aiming at? I love that you can see the holes where the film has been fed through the camera. Frank isn’t interested in perfection. It's about the process. It's about the journey. Much like life, I guess.