40 Fotos, page 24 1946

Here is a page from 40 Fotos, by Robert Frank. It looks like a photograph of buildings with multiple chimneys and washing hanging on a line. I wonder what Frank was thinking about when he took this picture? Maybe something about how architecture is always accompanied by the everyday lives of people who live in them. It is a very simple picture, but a very human one too, like the casual photographs made by Ed Ruscha. The grey scale feels almost cinematic. I wonder if the artist was interested in cinema. The angle of the image, tilted upwards as if taken from the ground, gives a sense of vertigo. There is something romantic, slightly melancholy in the image, like a film still from a foreign movie. As if we're looking at a memory of a place. It reminds me of when I look at old photos of my relatives.