City of London 5/Lines of My Hand 43 1952 - 1953

This is a contact sheet of negatives by Robert Frank, it's called City of London 5/Lines of My Hand 43, and it’s basically a collection of moments, film strips all stuck together. What gets me is how Frank's annotations become part of the piece, like another layer of information and texture. The way he’s marked up some of the frames, scribbled notes like ‘night’ and ‘noon’ – it's like he’s thinking aloud, deciding what matters and what doesn’t. There is one image near the top with a green circle that is intriguing, I wonder why he chose that one. You can see the grain of the film, the sprocket holes along the edges, and the dust and scratches that come with handling the material. It’s not just about the image, but the process of seeing and selecting. Robert Frank, like other photographers such as Garry Winogrand, gives us so much to consider. It's like the piece is asking us to keep looking.