Walker Evans' trip to Maine no number 1955

Curator: Robert Frank’s “Walker Evans' trip to Maine no number,” dated 1955, strikes me as an open invitation into a photographer’s mind. Editor: An open invitation indeed – and what a jumble! Raw edges, light leaks, subjects that are cut-off at random points in the negative strips! There is a lot here for us to digest materially. Curator: I see those contact sheets not as random or haphazard, but rather as capturing the energy of the moment; what's real is what sticks, everything else flies off! Like a jazzy free-for-all improvisation. The houses remind me of Hopper's architectural solitude; then you have interiors filled with an eerie ghostly light. Editor: Ah yes, and then there are also images of commercial transport trucks. This reminds me how mobile Frank's own work was: a roving commentary from the American road; one defined, I must say, by what goods were able to travel on them. Curator: That interplay is compelling here: a dialogue between fleeting observations and enduring structures. The mundane captured in a frame, immortalized by film, a tangible reality made ethereal through art. I feel like I am witnessing how a world filters into an artist’s imagination. Editor: Precisely. Frank turns that world, that landscape and these trucks in particular, into a raw commodity by documenting them with these processes and making them ‘art’. There is an intentional deconstruction of expectations at play here. The orange graffiti is, on that level, kind of appropriate somehow. Curator: That almost angry tagging on the film makes me wonder if, for him, it's an active way to both acknowledge and challenge the formal, maybe too reverent, history of photography! This photo acts like a rebel yell; not polished and restrained, but raw and full of feeling. Editor: Well, considering that Walker Evans made pictures documenting labor, commodities, and buildings a focus of American documentary photography and art practices alike, perhaps there is an unintentional acknowledgement by Frank on that end, as well! Curator: Yes, that might also be at work here! It's all swirling, unresolved, beautifully uncertain… and it is within those states that Robert Frank captures life itself! Editor: Well, Frank leaves us with plenty to consider indeed, and this "raw" assemblage of images invites its own fresh perspective each time you return to view it.