Guggenheim 490--Twentieth Century Fox film studio, Burbank, California 1956

Robert Frank shot this contact sheet at Twentieth Century Fox Studios in Burbank, California. I imagine Frank in the darkroom, squinting at these little frames. His eye, always searching, finds the moments that speak. The red grease pencil marks feel like a painter's hand, circling, editing, trying to get at something true. The images themselves—actors on a set, caught in the artificial glow of Hollywood—are just so self-consciously performative. Are they even real? I get the sense Frank is asking something like, "What's behind the curtain?" He must have been surrounded by all this staged drama, but his photographs cut through it all. He's not interested in the illusion, but in the human presence, the loneliness, the kind of strange beauty you find when the lights go down. Painters like to look at photographs – we are all magpies borrowing ideas from each other. The history of picture making is just one long conversation!