Trip south--Barcelona and south of France, Spain 6 1952

Robert Frank made this photographic contact sheet, ‘Trip South--Barcelona and south of France, Spain 6’ sometime during his travels. The marks and scrawls on the sheet are part of Frank’s process, showing how he chose particular images. Frank was interested in capturing what he saw as the reality of a place, rather than a romanticised view. In the post-war period, many artists tried to challenge institutional narratives, moving away from traditional modes of representation to try to capture something more raw and honest. This meant rejecting the idea of perfect composition and embracing a more documentary style. What could be more documentary than the contact sheet itself? Historians might look to Frank’s other photographic essays and films, alongside other sources, to better understand his place within that moment of social change and how this shaped his art. We understand art through the lens of its social and institutional context.