Paris 55B 1951 - 1952

Robert Frank made this photographic collage, Paris 55B, with gelatin silver print and colored pencil. Imagine him, hunched over a table, surrounded by strips of negatives. He's snipping, arranging, taping, and drawing—layering images of flower arrangements, cityscapes, and family portraits. What was he thinking, piecing together these disparate elements? Was he trying to capture a feeling, a memory, or maybe just the chaos of urban life? The numbers scrawled in blue, the red lines slashing across the bottom strip—these feel like notes to himself, almost like a painter marking up a canvas. This reminds me a little of Kurt Schwitters, not in look, but in the urge to make order from the world, like the whole world is his art supply store. It is a collection of fragments, a visual poem. Frank's work isn't about perfect representation. It's about feeling, intuition, and a raw kind of honesty. It's like he's saying, "Here's what I saw, here's how it felt." And that's a conversation I want to be part of.