Guggenheim 459/Americans 9--Hollywood 1956

Robert Frank exposed this photographic print, 'Guggenheim 459/Americans 9--Hollywood,' sometime in the mid-20th century. Just imagine Frank in the darkroom with his gloves on, carefully placing the filmstrip on the paper. The image is cool, almost cold. I'm struck by how Frank isolates certain frames with red marker, circling them as if to say, "Look here, this is important." What was it like to observe mid-century America? What caught his attention? What feelings did he experience? There’s a car at night, a crowd holding a banner. I wonder if he was thinking of Walker Evans, who also captured America with such starkness? The whole thing feels fleeting, like a memory fading at the edges, like the America that has been and is no more. Artists are always in conversation, you know? Each one building on what came before, remixing and re-imagining. Painting and photography are like that too—always shifting, always open to new ways of seeing. It's about the here and now, but it also about what could be, or maybe even what has been forgotten.