Switzerland 9 1961

Robert Frank’s Switzerland 9 is a photographic contact sheet, a storyboard of monochrome images taken somewhere in the Swiss Alps. I imagine Frank in the darkroom squinting at the developing images, a whole world emerging from the chemical soup! There's a sense of looking in, of trying to capture something fleeting like light on the mountains, or the way people huddle together in the cold. The composition has got this casual quality, like he's grabbing moments rather than staging them. It reminds me of when I paint from life, trying to catch the essence of a person or a scene before it vanishes. And the contrast! It’s rough and grainy, but I feel that it adds to the rawness, it gives it a human touch, you know? There's a story there in the way the images are framed, in the spaces in between each shot, like hesitating and moving on. It's like he's showing us the whole process of seeing, not just the final picture. That's what makes art interesting, the feeling of someone trying to figure something out.