Wright Morris no number 1951

Robert Frank made this black and white photographic contact sheet, ‘Wright Morris no number’, sometime during his lifetime. It's like looking over an artist's shoulder, into the intimate, iterative process of portraiture. What was Frank thinking as he snapped each frame? Was he directing Wright Morris, or capturing candid moments as Morris moved? There's a play between formality and intimacy, as Morris shifts his gaze, his posture. The composition creates a staccato rhythm, a sequence of similar yet subtly different poses. The black bars between each frame, with the numbers printed on them, amplify the feeling of time passing. It's a study in seeing, recording, and selecting. The sequence reminds me of Eadweard Muybridge's motion studies, where he captured movement in discrete frames. But here, Frank isn't just documenting movement. He's capturing something more elusive: personality, mood, the passage of time itself. It's a conversation between photographer and subject. Frank is asking, 'How do we see? How do we remember? How do we make a picture of a person?'