Museum of Modern Art 4 1955

This gelatin silver print, called ‘Museum of Modern Art 4,’ was made by Robert Frank sometime in the mid-twentieth century. What strikes me about seeing a contact sheet like this is how the act of making art is so often about selecting and deselecting, not only about taking the shot but about seeing the shot, and then choosing the one. Look at how the images bleed into one another, with the sprocket holes running up the sides like so many little windows, each frame a slightly different view of the same scene. Do you see the handwritten number '4' scrawled across the middle? It's a reminder of the artist's hand, a mark of intervention in the mechanical process of photography. It's like a painter’s gesture, a smudge or stroke that says, “I was here, I saw this, and I chose this.” The Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti springs to mind, both artists wrestle with the problem of how to represent the human figure in space, how to capture the sense of isolation and alienation that characterizes modern life. I love how Frank embraces ambiguity. Nothing is ever quite resolved, and that’s what makes it so compelling.