Mill--Butte, Montana 1956

Robert Frank captured this black and white photograph, Mill-Butte, Montana with a camera and film, of course! I can imagine Frank there in the dark, looking at the mill and thinking about the way industry kind of looms in our lives, the way it's always there, even when we're not thinking about it. The image feels stark, almost like a document, but there's also something deeply personal about it. Those lines of the telephone wires—they remind me of a drawing, kind of clumsy, but full of feeling. It must have been cold. The number '699' that's been painted onto the mill makes me think of Jasper Johns and his numbers, which Frank must have known about. This could be a record, a note, a symbol. Like all the best artworks, it manages to be all these things at once. It makes me think about all the different ways artists talk to each other across time.