Guggenheim 762--New York City 1956

This is Robert Frank’s contact sheet for Guggenheim 762, documenting New York City. He made this gelatin silver print sometime in the mid-twentieth century. Look at the filmstrip format; it reveals photography as a process, a series of moments and angles. The texture of the gelatin silver print gives it a certain depth and luminosity; the blacks are rich, and the grays have a beautiful range. In the top filmstrip, there's a frame circled in red; what caught his eye in that particular shot? It has an urgency in the everyday. I think about Walker Evans, another photographer known for his straightforward, un-posed depictions of American life. But where Evans's work often feels formal and composed, Frank's has a rawer, more immediate quality, and reminds us that art is, at its heart, a conversation, a back-and-forth between artists and ideas across time. Nothing is fixed, everything is open to interpretation.