Jehovah's Witness 3 1958

Robert Frank made this contact sheet, Jehovah's Witness 3, using photography, sometime in the mid to late 20th century. It’s all about the process, right? I mean, look at it, a series of moments laid bare on a single sheet. The materiality here is so upfront. It's not a slick, finished print, but a record of looking, framing, and choosing. You can see the edges of the frames, the sprockets, all that nitty-gritty stuff that’s usually cropped away. In the bottom row, there’s this image of people on a street corner, circled in what looks like grease pencil. It's a direct, unpretentious mark. Frank reminds me a bit of Garry Winogrand, that same streetwise energy, that willingness to dive right into the messy reality of things. But where Winogrand was expansive, Frank could be so intimate, like he's whispering secrets to the film. It shows that art doesn't always have to be about answers, sometimes it's about embracing the questions, the doubts, the beautiful ambiguity of it all.