Road--Landscape 1941 - 1945

Robert Frank made this photograph, Road—Landscape, at some point in his life, fixing the view with light on a rectangular sheet. The composition is so simple and yet so full of suggestion, isn't it? I think of the times I’ve tried to capture a scene, maybe on a road trip myself, the way the light falls across the land, but it’s never quite what you felt. Frank's world is grainy and full of contrast, the road like a path forward, but to where? I feel him looking, seeing, framing, the same way a painter thinks about a canvas before even laying down a mark. It reminds me of the painter Fairfield Porter, his landscapes so honest, so plain, but somehow, in the very act of noticing, they become extraordinary. Maybe Frank was trying to do that too. To capture the extraordinariness of the everyday, one frame at a time.