Back lot--Hollywood 39 1958

Robert Frank's gelatin silver print, "Back lot--Hollywood 39," captures a film strip of Hollywood's fabricated reality. I imagine Frank, roaming through this artificial landscape, framing the mundane. Click, click, click—each frame a slightly different angle of the same scene. He’s got a smokestack structure, perhaps a set piece, rendered in stark black and white. It reminds me of Giorgio de Chirico's surrealist cityscapes; that feeling of being slightly off. It's like Frank is saying: look at this construction, this illusion. What does it mean? The film strip format itself becomes part of the story, revealing the process of image-making. It’s a stuttering narrative, a series of attempts to capture something elusive. A conversation about seeing, about how we construct meaning through images. We, the viewer, have to participate in this making of meaning.