Hollywood 72 1958

This is Robert Frank's "Hollywood 72", a photo collage made with black and white film. It's a bit like a storyboard, or maybe even a film strip laid bare. You get the sense of a sequence, an event unfolding, but without a clear narrative. The grainy texture and the way the images are laid out, slightly overlapping, gives it a raw, almost diaristic feel. It reminds me of when I work on a canvas, building up layers, scratching back, revealing and concealing. There’s one frame where a figure turns their head, catching the light, and it disrupts the flow of the image. It's kind of like a painterly gesture, a moment of disruption that keeps the eye moving. Frank was always playing with this tension between capturing reality and injecting his own subjective experience. Think of someone like Gerhard Richter, who also blurred those lines between photography and painting. It’s this constant pushing and pulling that makes art so endlessly fascinating, isn't it?