Cemetery--Wyoming 1956

Curator: Gazing at this image, I’m instantly swept into a quietude… a stillness amplified by the distant mountains and endless cemetery stretching behind these two women. What's your immediate read on this one? Editor: Bleak, stark. My eyes are drawn straight to the earth, the fresh, raw mound of dirt – you can practically smell the clay. It’s raw and speaks to labor… speaks to grief literally grounded in the soil of Wyoming. It looks like a gelatin silver print by Robert Frank from 1956 called “Cemetery—Wyoming”. Curator: "Grounded" – I like that. There's something painfully beautiful in its rawness. The contrast between the softness of their patterned dresses and the rugged earth; do you see it too? As though life and death, beauty and hardship are intrinsically intertwined? Editor: Absolutely. And think about silver gelatin prints—that labor too! Mining the silver, processing the chemicals. Even the aesthetic is tied to a material process. It is all physically rooted in place through labor and mourning and material production. Curator: Indeed. Frank, who's work often seems to capture transient moments in time, manages here, quite starkly to blend, permanence, history and raw human feeling in a single image. It really stays with you. Do you get that same feeling? Editor: Yes. And it makes me think of those other graves, dotted endlessly on the landscape. Think about the mining, the ranching, the struggles etched into that land, the embodied labor of generations laid to rest and visualized through the material components. Curator: Such weight, such reflection in those shadows and light. The print's materiality adds so much dimension doesn't it? I keep finding myself drawn to the woman on the left and that tool she’s holding. There is some unknown, untold connection. The image as artifact. Editor: I can't get past the earth itself. Its tangibility connects us. What will be our relationship to those elements someday? How will they be extracted? Whose labor will be part of that process? Food for thought, certainly. Curator: So much. So many stories beneath our feet. Editor: Exactly, physically beneath, created and transformed.