Fence--Landscape 1941 - 1945

This black and white photograph, Fence--Landscape, was made by Robert Frank. It looks like the image was taken in the middle of winter, you can tell by the snow covering everything. It’s that lovely, slightly grubby snow, it reminds me of being a kid. Frank’s photograph has such a keen awareness of the surface, the texture, the grain, like the way the fence slices across the frame, dividing the foreground from the background. You can see that the fence is in the foreground with the snow in focus, but further back, there is a building that is out of focus. Frank's earlier photographs, especially from "The Americans", explore similar themes of alienation and the mundane, but they do so with a rawer, more confrontational edge. Like Emmet Gowin, Frank finds beauty in the ordinary. His work isn’t just about documenting what he sees, but also about imbuing those observations with a sense of self.