Guggenheim 732--Omaha, Nebraska to Des Moines, Iowa 1956

Robert Frank made this photographic contact sheet, Guggenheim 732—Omaha, Nebraska to Des Moines, Iowa, using silver gelatin, sometime in the mid-20th century. It's raw, like a painter’s sketch, all the frames of the film strip are there, not prettied up. Frank leaves in the blurry, the banal, and the badly framed—and it’s here that you see his eye. He embraces the ordinary. The grayscale palette gives it a documentary feel, but it’s far from objective. It’s more like a visual diary, a road trip condensed onto a single sheet. Look at the row of highway shots. They cut the sheet in half, both formally and metaphorically. The road as a signifier of freedom and possibility, but there's also a sense of isolation. It's a powerful piece about seeing, about life on the road, about America itself. It's like Frank is showing us how he sees, not just what he sees. I’m reminded of Ed Ruscha’s photo books, "Every Building on the Sunset Strip," that same deadpan aesthetic, the same sense of detached observation.