Guggenheim 366--Houston, Texas 1955

This photographic work is a contact sheet of images of Houston, Texas by Robert Frank. I can imagine Frank in his darkroom, hunched over developing trays, the red light casting a glow on his face. Each frame offers a fragment of Houston, a city seen through Frank's eyes, as he moves through the urban landscape looking at buildings and the sky. The repeated images are like memories, revisited and examined from different angles. There is an interesting tension between the serial nature of the contact sheet and the individual images it contains. A painter like Gerhard Richter does something similar. In Richter's 4900 Colours, the grid is almost more important than the individual colors themselves. Here, Frank’s work with seriality prefigures the work of artists like Richter, drawing attention to photography’s role in capturing and organizing fragments of reality. In the end, Frank's work reminds us that artmaking is really just a form of inquiry, a way of making sense of the world around us.