Guggenheim 156--Trenton, New Jersey 1956

Robert Frank made this photographic work, *Guggenheim 156--Trenton, New Jersey*, sometime in the mid-20th century. It's a contact sheet—a direct print from the negative, revealing all the frames, and it gives you insight into Frank's editing process. The thing about a contact sheet is that it isn't slick. You get the sense of the artist sifting through a multitude of images, searching for something specific. The texture is raw, unrefined, and immediate. See the red marks across the frames? Those edits are a physical record of Frank's thoughts, a kind of drawing on the surface of the photograph, making artmaking as an act of conversation. I think about Ed Ruscha's artist books. Like Ruscha, Frank embraces the everyday, elevates it, and presents it back to us as something worth noticing. Both understand that art isn't just about the final product, it's about the journey, the choices, and the dialogue.