Guggenheim 327--Baton Rouge, Louisiana 1955

This is Guggenheim 327, a strip of black and white 35mm film by Robert Frank. He shot it at some point, probably in the 1950s while travelling across America. The film is raw and uncut. What grabs me is the texture of the film itself: the grain, the sprocket holes, the way the images bleed into one another. It’s like looking at a memory, fragmented and imperfect. You can almost smell the chemicals, feel the darkroom dust. Look at the strip with the crowd of people – maybe at a football game – the contrast is so high it is almost abstract. Is that light leak? Or is that a metaphor for the explosive energy of the crowd? Frank’s work reminds me a bit of Garry Winogrand. Both were street photographers who captured the energy of everyday life. But Frank's work has a kind of melancholy that really gets to me. His images are less about capturing a moment and more about capturing a feeling. There's no real resolution here, just a collection of images that invite us to make our own meaning.