Congressional T c. 1954 - 1955

Robert Frank made this black and white contact sheet, Congressional T, sometime during his career. It's raw, like a sketchbook page, showing the artist's process, the hit-and-miss of image-making. The surface is matte, a little grainy, which only amplifies the image's documentary feel. Frank is working with photography here, not to create a seamless illusion, but to capture a kind of truth, however fleeting or imperfect. Look at the red marker slashes. They're brutal, decisive, marking the images Frank rejected. Each cross is like a bold brushstroke, a graphic intervention. Those red crosses also tell us so much about the editing process, what gets included, what gets left out. It's a reminder that art is about choice, selection, and that even the discards can be revealing. I’m reminded of Garry Winogrand, another street photographer who shot rolls and rolls of film and only later worked out what he was doing. In the end, art is always a kind of experiment, and these images remain open for us to interpret.