Mute/Blind 1989

Robert Frank’s layered photo assemblage, *Mute/Blind*, is a poignant meditation on seeing and not-seeing. It’s a visual poem constructed from small photographs, a maroon background, and text scrawled across the top. I imagine Frank piecing this together, shuffling and arranging these little windows into his world. The images themselves—dogs, deer, portraits, trains—fade into darkness in the lower section. The surface has a physical presence, a kind of collage-y thickness. That title, *Mute/Blind*, feels handwritten, personal. Frank probably took the photos himself, and as he combined and layered them, was he thinking about how we perceive? How our senses shape our understanding? The layering feels like a metaphor for memory, or the accumulation of experience. It’s like he’s saying, "Here are some things I’ve seen, and here’s how they feel when I put them all together." There's a conversation happening here between seeing, feeling, and knowing. It’s the kind of conversation artists have with each other across time, each of us building on the other's attempts to make sense of the world.