Bulletin board--Casper, Wyoming 1956

Robert Frank made this photograph, "Bulletin board--Casper, Wyoming," at an undetermined date using black and white film. The greyscale is rich, but the image feels grainy, like it’s been worked over a few times. In painting, we’d call it building up layers. The real substance of this piece is in its textures: the rough grain of the photograph contrasting with the smooth surfaces in the televised picture. You’ve got the textures of paper, photos, maybe even a painting of some kind. It’s like Frank's showing us the world as a collage, a collection of surfaces that are all talking to each other. The way that light reflects off these objects, each telling its own story. It's not just about what's depicted, but how the textures and light play together. I’m thinking of Bernd and Hilla Becher, and their photographs of industrial structures, like Frank, they were interested in the way that images accumulate, and in the poetry of documentation. Ultimately, this photograph is a reminder that seeing is an active, interpretive process.