Family--New York City no number 1953

This is Robert Frank’s ‘Family—New York City, no number’, a photographic work, though the date is unknown. It looks like a bunch of film strips laid out on a board. It’s all about the process: contact sheets, raw materials, that kind of thing. The texture is what gets me. The grain of the film, the sprocket holes, the way the images are slightly out of focus, it's like he wants you to see the imperfections. In the top strips there’s a woman and a child in a subway car. The child is sort of glum, but the mother looks like she's trying to be cheerful. Then below that are strips of a little boy outside washing or playing in the sun. It’s such a human scene, nothing special, but everything special. Frank had a knack for capturing those everyday moments and making them feel huge. I think of Garry Winogrand, another street photographer who got that feeling of real life across. It reminds me that art can be found anywhere, in the simplest of things, if you're willing to look.