Produce at market--Food 1941 - 1945

This is Robert Frank's photograph, 'Produce at Market--Food,' a silver print on paper made sometime in the mid-20th century. It's full of stacks of crates. What I notice first is the graininess, a visual texture that feels so tangible. It reminds me of the darkroom and the physical process of developing a photograph, of the light hitting the paper. There's a flatness to the picture; everything seems compressed, maybe because of the lens or the angle. The repetition of the crates, the fruit, and the figures creates a rhythm, like a visual echo. I'm drawn to the contrast between the dark fruit and the light crates, and the little bursts of light that filter through the leaves of the trees above. It's the detail of these out-of-focus trees that make you feel like you are there. Frank finds the extraordinary in the ordinary, doesn’t he? Like Helen Levitt, he's so good at capturing the poetry of everyday life. His images are never just about what they depict, but about how they make you feel. It's that open-endedness that makes his work so compelling.