Highway 40, Delaware--Lines of My Hand 94/Florida 9 1958

This is Robert Frank's "Highway 40, Delaware--Lines of My Hand 94/Florida 9", a gelatin silver print with applied media. It's a photographer’s material, and the way Frank works with it has a painterly sensibility; a kind of rough and ready methodology which so many painters would have adopted in the 60s. I love to imagine him handling this strip of negatives, cutting, arranging, collaging, and marking up the surface of the film; the orange and blue lines especially suggesting, or rather enacting, the feeling of improvisation. There’s something so touchable and intimate about this object. What does it mean for a photograph to be like a drawing, like a painting? Maybe it means that we value the hand-made and the imperfect over the seamless illusion. Frank reminds me of other artists, like Gerhard Richter, who pushed at the boundaries of the medium to see what it could do, what it might become. Thinking about the way artists talk to each other across time makes me smile. There’s room for everybody, after all.