Guggenheim 349--Esso oil refinery, Baton Rouge, Louisiana 1955

Robert Frank shot this roll of Kodak safety film, depicting the Esso oil refinery in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. It's a contact sheet, meaning it shows every image from the roll, in sequence, a bit like a storyboard. I'm thinking about Frank, driving around with his camera, what he saw, and what caught his eye. He was interested in all sorts of things. He wanted to capture the way that industrial landscapes were changing the look and feel of America. Each frame offers a mini-narrative, a snippet of life at the refinery. You can see people on bikes, giant looming tanks, workers inside rooms, and rows of equipment. I wonder, what was Frank thinking when he pressed the shutter? It's like he was trying to capture the zeitgeist, the mood of a nation caught between progress and something else – alienation? I'm also thinking about other artists, like the Bechers, who also documented industrial landscapes in a similarly detached way. This contact sheet feels like a conversation between the artist and the world, each image a question, an observation, a moment of pause.