Nuns walking along Bay--San Francisco 1956

Robert Frank shot this photograph, Nuns walking along Bay—San Francisco, sometime in the mid-twentieth century. It’s a small, square black and white print. I see two dark figures standing on a road, their backs to us, gazing out at the view of the bay, which stretches out behind them, hazy and indistinct. The figures are nuns, presumably. Their habits, the turn in the road, and even the weather seem to conspire to block our vision of the scene. I wonder what Frank was thinking when he made this? I imagine him as a solitary figure, always on the lookout for moments of quiet drama and symbolic resonance, like the way the curve of the road seems to mirror the shape of the mountain in the distance. The composition is simple, almost stark, but the feeling is rich with melancholic beauty and open-ended narrative. I think he wanted to capture something fleeting and ephemeral about modern life. He manages to create an image that feels both specific to its time and place, and deeply timeless.