Guggenheim 673--Elko, Nevada 1956

Robert Frank made 'Guggenheim 673--Elko, Nevada', a photographic contact sheet, probably in the late 1950s or early 60s. The whole piece is an array of different pictures, a matrix of images, like a storyboard of memories, all held together on a single sheet. It's like a collection of sketches that reveals as much as it conceals. Look at the way the film strip is torn at the bottom. It's raw and immediate, like a snapshot of the artist’s process. Each image is a fragment, and yet the whole sheet is unified, speaking to the fragmented experience of modern life. I think of Moholy-Nagy, his experiments with photography, and the way he looked at the world through the lens of the everyday. Frank is similar, but with a much more poetic sensibility. He's looking for something deeper, something truer. He embraces the unfinished.