Southampton 1 1951

Robert Frank's "Southampton 1" is a photogram, a sheet of film with images from Southampton. The film is arranged in three rows that show three different subjects. I wonder what Frank might have been thinking when he made this. Maybe he saw the rows like lines in a poem. Maybe, like a painter, he was trying to find the right balance on the page. The light is muted and gray like so many days in Southampton. It makes me think of a rainy day in the studio, seeing how the ink spreads on a page. The house perched on stilts is repeated again and again and has a painterly, slightly abstracted feel. And right at the end, a fragment of a sign—the words "Park, Widening to"—peek through, like a thought left unfinished. I think all artists talk to each other across time, trying to show us different ways of seeing, thinking, and feeling. Photography and painting; they're all ways of making sense of the world.