Guggenheim 54/Detroit 24 1955

Robert Frank made this contact sheet, "Guggenheim 54/Detroit 24," with photographs shot on film, developed, and then printed onto paper. It is about mark-making in the sense of selections made, or crops suggested – look at those sharp red marker lines that Frank drew, that give you an insight into what he valued! Here, in this work, the paper is the thing, a surface which holds, or rather frames, other surfaces, so we’re talking about many layers of transparency here. The black bars of the film strips against the individual frames create a strong rhythmic structure. Your eye jumps across the surface in fits and starts, landing on the more evocative images. The Woolworths picture with figures massed outside – a potential flashpoint, but also a human huddle. The other picture I keep coming back to is the one of people in a car, or several cars, actually. Frank shares something with Garry Winogrand in the sense of embracing the messiness of life. In many ways this piece can be seen as a precursor to the later work of Gerhard Richter.