Nixon campaign 4 1960

Robert Frank made this piece called Nixon campaign 4 with a camera and film, and what we are looking at is a section of the negative strip. The image presents a sequence, a before and after, but it doesn’t dictate a specific narrative. Frank isn’t interested in giving us the whole picture, but rather in the fragmentary and the peripheral. I get a sense of artmaking as a process of selection, editing, and curation, like sketching with scissors. I love the texture of the film, the grain and the sprocket holes, it gives the image a tactile quality, a feeling of being close to the material. There’s one frame with a red box drawn on it, which looks like an annotation by the artist himself. It’s a trace of Frank’s looking, his own way of emphasizing a particular moment or detail. Frank reminds me a little of Garry Winogrand, another street photographer with a knack for capturing the energy and chaos of American life. But while Winogrand’s compositions are often dense and dynamic, Frank’s are more pared down, more contemplative. Like all good art, it embraces ambiguity and invites us to bring our own experiences and perspectives to it.