Paris 60B 1951 - 1952

Robert Frank made this contact sheet, called Paris 60B, using gelatin silver. It’s a matrix of captured moments, a storyboard of cityscapes, interiors, and portraits. Frank presents us with the raw material of image-making, the strips of film laid bare. I can imagine him hunched over in the darkroom, sifting through these frames. He's searching for the perfect shot, and then marking them up with red and blue grease pencil like he is editing directly onto the world. See those interiors of Parisian cafes? Each image has a slightly different composition, each capturing a different mood. There is so much to see in the differences and the similarities. Frank was deeply influenced by Walker Evans and the documentary tradition, but he pushed it further into the realm of the personal and the subjective. This work feels so connected to his seminal work, The Americans. Both projects remind us that photography can be a form of poetry, an ongoing conversation about what it means to be human.