Paris 74B 1951 - 1952

Here's Robert Frank's "Paris 74B," a photographic print with added color. It's a contact sheet, or maybe a proof, of multiple images from a roll of film. I think Frank is in conversation with the Cubists here. He's layering time and space, presenting a narrative through multiple frames, each capturing a slightly different moment. The added colors, those hand-drawn scribbles in blue, yellow and red, feels so playful, like he's marking his territory, or defacing it, or annotating a kind of image diary! I imagine him hunched over this contact sheet, maybe late at night, the city lights reflecting off the glossy surface. He’s probably thinking about memory, about how fragmented our experiences really are. The process of making art can be a kind of inquiry, for both the artist and the viewer. Frank is really asking us to think about photography, about what it means to capture a moment. Artists keep answering each other across time!