Florida 6 1958

This is ‘Florida 6’ by Robert Frank and it’s a black and white photograph, but not just one image. It’s a contact sheet! I look at this and I immediately feel for Frank, as he must have gone through this roll of film and thought, huh? I see a sequence of images, each with their own quality, but the composition is more like a series of experiments, which is what all art is! I imagine Frank deciding what to include or exclude. I bet he felt a mix of exhilaration and doubt, like any artist trying to capture something elusive! And then, in a moment of intuition, he circled some of these images in red, editing them together. How are they connected? The human eye is such that the viewer will always try to make connections. Through this combination, it is clear Frank wanted to show us not just the images themselves but the messy, intuitive process of seeing the world through a lens.