500 East Rialto Avenue, Venice, California 1978

Robert Frank made this gelatin silver print, 500 East Rialto Avenue, Venice, California, in 1975. Look at this gridded photograph of palm trees. It seems to me he was piecing together fragments of a real place. Like a memory that's never quite whole. I imagine Frank wandering around Venice, camera in hand, feeling the light, the grit, the weirdness of the place. He probably snapped these shots quickly, intuitively, without too much fuss, like sketches in a visual diary. But instead of just one shot, he captured different angles, maybe at different times. It's like the cubists, who tried to show all sides of an object at once! The tree itself becomes a character, its rigid trunk oddly juxtaposed with the word 'Fantastic'. Maybe Frank was thinking about the gap between fantasy and reality, or the way we try to capture something elusive and alive. All artists are engaged in a continual exchange of ideas and insights, inspiring each other to create. Like painters, Frank asks us to look closer, to see the world in pieces, and to embrace the beautiful uncertainty of it all.