South America and Spain 11 1948

This is ‘South America and Spain 11’, a film contact sheet made by Robert Frank. I love how photography makes you see in a totally different way. Here we have a bunch of little frames and each one is a world. I mean look at the first row of images: buildings, crowds, maybe protests, smoke billowing. What do you make of it? The grain, the light, it's all very filmic, very now. Then you glimpse a landscape, and a window frame. I wonder about the photographer, Robert Frank. You can imagine him walking around with his camera, his eye finding these little moments, these little stories. You see some nature shots and some architectural photographs. It all feels both immediate and distant. The contact sheet itself becomes a document. A whole story. Photography is just like painting, it is a conversation between what you see and what you feel and then what you do. Robert Frank did this, and his images continue to speak to us, across time.