Hollywood 36 1958

Here we have ‘Hollywood 36’ a photographic work by Robert Frank. The film strip, with its sequences of stills, makes me think about process, like sketches in a painter's studio. The graininess, those stark blacks and whites, and the handwritten marks, they feel so physical, so immediate. There's a raw energy here, like Frank’s right there in the darkroom, wrestling with the image. Look how some frames are scratched out in red, what was wrong with them? Why keep the mistakes so visible? I’m fascinated by that imperfection, the not-quite-rightness of it all. This reminds me of some of the work by Stan Brakhage. Frank and Brakhage share that sense of trying to grab hold of something fleeting, something felt, but hard to pin down, revealing that the meaning isn't fixed but is in the looking.