Shutter--40 Fotos 1946

Robert Frank made this print, Shutter--40 Fotos, using stark black ink on a white page. It’s a close-up of a camera shutter, but it could be a diagram or even some kind of mechanical flower. The boldness of the black lines, and the way they carve out the white space, gives the image a graphic quality, a real sense of contrast. I love the way Frank reduces the mechanics of the camera to simple shapes. The circle becomes the dominant form, echoed in the lens and the surrounding dial. Each line, each curve, feels deliberate. There’s a tension between the precision of the lines and the slightly rough edges, a kind of human touch in the mechanical rendering. Look at the lower dial, the tiny dashes, almost like teeth – it’s so precise, yet still feels hand-drawn. Like, say, Moholy-Nagy, Frank saw the potential for abstraction in the everyday. What he’s doing here is inviting us to look at the world through a different lens, to see beauty in the mundane.