Switzerland 4 1961

This is Robert Frank’s Switzerland 4, a photo made with, what looks like, a film camera. The whole contact sheet is here, like a painter's preliminary sketch, or studies for a bigger composition. I bet Frank was like, “Okay, let's see what I got.” It's so cool to see the editing process laid bare, the outtakes alongside the keepers. It gives you a sense of the artist's eye, what they were drawn to, what they discarded. Some shots are upside down, some overexposed—happy accidents or experiments gone awry? I wonder, what was Frank thinking when he snapped these frames? Was he trying to capture the grandeur of the Swiss landscape, or was he after something more intimate, more human? This makes me think of other artists like Gerhard Richter and his "Atlas" project: images collected over a lifetime and reconfigured to make new meaning. The beauty of photography, like painting, is in its ambiguity. It invites us to bring our own stories, our own interpretations, to the table. Each image a little portal into a different way of seeing, of feeling, of being in the world.