New York City 4 1960

This is Robert Frank’s ‘New York City 4,’ a series of photographs printed on a sheet. The whole contact sheet is the artwork. It's like seeing the artist's mind at work, deciding what to show and what to leave out. The grainy blacks and whites speak to the physicality of the medium. The texture is raw, honest. Frank isn't trying to hide the process. You can almost smell the darkroom chemicals. I keep coming back to the middle row of images, those horses in the field. There's one frame where the horse is mid-leap, frozen in time. It's a fleeting moment made permanent, a reminder of how art can capture the ephemeral. Frank’s images have a similar feel to the early work of Garry Winogrand, who also liked to work in series, each photographer is chasing an ideal of authenticity in the urban landscape. Ultimately, this sheet is a conversation about what it means to see and be seen.