Alfred Leslie--Painters no number c. 1950s

This contact sheet, Alfred Leslie--Painters no number, comes to us from Robert Frank. Immediately, the iterative nature of Frank's artistic process is on display. He isn’t just after a single image, but a series. I’m drawn to the frames where the artist’s hand is visible, caught in the act. The texture isn't just in the painting itself but also in the graininess of the black and white film. This gives the work a raw, immediate feel. In one frame, a large X is scrawled over the image – a decisive mark rejecting a particular shot. It's fascinating, this act of editing. Seeing these images as a sequence, you get a sense of art as a conversation, where each mark, each photo, is a response to what came before. It reminds me of work by Gerhard Richter, who also explored the relationship between photography and painting. It's a messy, beautiful dialogue, full of starts, stops, and revisions.