Guggenheim 682--Salt Lake City, Utah 1956

Robert Frank’s Guggenheim 682—Salt Lake City, Utah, is a photographic contact sheet. It’s the artist's way of working laid bare: test strips, outtakes, even notes, presented as one complete image. The film strip format gives you this wonderful sense of time passing. Frank is really thinking through his shots as he takes them, and there's something intimate about seeing a photographer's thinking and working processes so candidly. It reminds me a little of when I see a painter leave the underpainting exposed in the final image. The individual images feel casual and immediate, capturing details of place. But look at how they are connected, the way they all come together. Frank's art is here, in the combination of chance and deliberation, the flow between the documentary impulse and a personal vision. It makes me think of photographers like Garry Winogrand, who also embraced the unpredictable energy of the street. It is a piece that reminds us that art is about seeing, and the process of seeing is never fixed or finished.