Paris 55B 1951 - 1952

Robert Frank made this photographic collage, Paris 55B, sometime in the middle of the last century. It’s built up of strips of film, contact sheets, taped and stuck down on a dark gray board, with some blue and red marker pen on top. I love seeing this kind of working process laid bare. Frank is showing us how he selects and edits, turning photography into something painterly. The high-key monochrome images have a beautiful grain, interspersed with handwritten notes in blue. At the bottom, a strip of family portraits is marked with red pen, like a memory he wants to keep close. This piece reminds me a little bit of the work of Gerhard Richter, especially his 'Atlas' project. Both artists are wrestling with the archive, trying to find a form for the overwhelming flow of images in the modern world. It’s not about perfect images, it’s about the messy, human act of seeing.