Guggenheim 172--Palm Beach, Florida 1955

This is ‘Guggenheim 172--Palm Beach, Florida’ by Robert Frank. It's a series of black and white film strips on paper, and it looks like Frank was thinking, editing, and selecting as he went along. I can imagine Robert Frank wandering around Palm Beach, snapping pictures, maybe feeling a bit like an outsider in this shiny, wealthy place. And then, back in the darkroom, he's got these strips of film – little moments captured, and he’s marking them up with red pen. It’s like he's having a conversation with himself, circling certain images, drawing arrows, making decisions about what to keep and what to discard. That red pen is such a decisive, graphic gesture against the grayscale of the photos. It highlights the act of seeing, thinking, and choosing, emphasizing the artist's hand in constructing the final image. It reminds me of Cy Twombly’s mark-making, scribbles that are both deliberate and spontaneous. It makes me think about how artists are always in dialogue with one another, riffing on ideas across time and place.