London 18 1952 - 1953

Robert Frank’s "London 18" shows a sheet of black and white film, edited with painted red marker. You can see how he shifts perspective, trying out different shots of London parks and trees. I wonder what Frank was thinking when he made this. Did he consider each frame? Was he trying to pick the best one? I bet he felt like he was painting. Trying to capture the feeling of that London fog, to build layer upon layer of exposure. The filmstrip almost becomes like an abstract collage, more about texture and pattern than representing any particular place. And the red marker makes me think of a painter’s gestural marks, maybe a cy Twombly. I imagine Frank circling and crossing out images, deciding what to keep, what to discard, like a painter scraping off the surface of the canvas. Painters and photographers, we’re all in the same boat, fishing for something real in a sea of possibilities. We don’t want to illustrate, we want to get to the bottom of what it all means, how it feels.