Guggenheim 688--Butte, Montana 1956

Robert Frank made this contact sheet, "Guggenheim 688--Butte, Montana," most likely in a darkroom. You see the world as a series of frames, a sequence in which the photographer is not necessarily looking for the perfect image, but for a sense of movement, of being in the world. Frank wasn’t after polished surfaces but grainy, high-contrast glimpses of reality. The texture here isn't about a smooth, concealed surface. It's about the rawness of the moment, the kind of fleeting encounters you might have while driving across America. In this sheet, the red pencil marks around certain frames aren’t corrections, but clues! This is a photographer thinking out loud, deciding what to show and what to leave out. The contact sheet format reminds me of artists like Gerhard Richter, who also used seriality to question the idea of a single, definitive image. Both artists embrace a kind of productive ambiguity.