Text page with illustration number / Back cover 1952

Here's the back cover of Robert Frank's *The Americans*, a book with no date. The cover is a field of off-white, softly aged, you can almost feel the texture of the page with your eyes. It reminds me of early Agnes Martin, but without the pencil lines brought to the foreground. Here, the lines of the grid are so subtle, they are barely there. What remains is a vast openness and a sense of the infinite. There's a dark spine with the holes punched to hold it all together. But the real punch is that number "34" printed small in the corner. This could be seen as the end of something, the back cover, or the beginning of something else. This reminds me that art is all about exchange, where ideas are traded and re-worked over time. Art embraces ambiguity, and it's up to us to be okay with that.