Paris 69B 1951 - 1952

Robert Frank made this contact sheet, Paris 69B, sometime around 1969, using film and ink. The way he's marked up the film strip really grabs me; it's like a painter attacking a canvas, deciding what's in, what's out. It's all about the process of selection. I'm drawn to the blue marks he's made around certain frames. Look how he circles a blurry street scene, giving it a kind of importance. It's like he's saying, "This one, even though it's messy, even though it's not perfect, it has something." The ink feels so immediate, so physical, like he's wrestling with the images, trying to pin them down. And that handwritten "69" at the top right – it's so casual, so human. It reminds me that artmaking is just a person making choices, leaving their mark. Thinking about other artists who worked with photography, like Gerhard Richter and his "Atlas" project, Frank's contact sheet feels like a raw, personal version of that, a peek into the artist's mind as they grapple with the world.