Guggenheim 683--Salt Lake City, Utah 1956

Robert Frank made this contact sheet somewhere in Salt Lake City, Utah, at an unknown date. Look at all those little frames of film, like a painter’s sketchbook, full of ideas. You can imagine him driving around, seeing something out the window, snapping a photo, and then another, trying to catch just the right light, the right feeling. I sympathize with this artistic impulse. It makes me wonder what he was thinking as he was compiling his "Americans" series. The film strip is grainy and raw, with each frame a little window into a different moment. The dark blacks and bright whites create a high contrast, making everything feel a bit edgy, a bit urgent. The lone tree in a field, a group of people indoors, a main street, it's all here, like fragments of a story. It's like he is trying to distill America into these little squares, trying to get at something real, something true. I think it's about the space between things, the unspoken stories, and the quiet moments.