Italy 8 1964

Robert Frank’s ‘Italy 8’ is a contact sheet, a collection of images shot in Italy. It's a process laid bare, right? You see the test shots, the over- and underexposed ones, the compositions he didn't quite nail. What strikes me is the physicality here. The actual grain of the film is so present. It reminds us that photography is a material process, not just the click of a button. It’s about chemistry, light, and the artist's hand in selecting and developing the images. I am drawn to frames 53 and 54, they look like a kind of ‘X’ marks the spot. They don’t quite align but they give you a sense of what Frank wanted to capture and chose not to. Frank reminds me a little bit of Garry Winogrand, both just capturing the everyday, the chaotic. But while Winogrand felt like a madman, Frank seems more melancholic to me, more poetic. But in the end, who knows for sure? Art is all about that ambiguity, that space for us to wander and wonder.