Peru, page 28 1948

Robert Frank made this photograph, Peru, page 28, out in Peru. The photograph is a bleak and grainy landscape, a kind of nowhere-place where train tracks stretch out and vanish into the horizon. I feel like I can feel Frank standing there, his camera up against his eye, trying to capture something about this desolation. It must have been so stark, this place. Did he feel alone? I bet he did. I know this feeling – the artist alone, trying to capture what it feels like to be them, in that place, at that time. You look at this and feel the dryness of the place, the emptiness, and it stays with you. So simple, yet so evocative. I feel a kinship with him, and with anyone trying to make something in a world that is so relentlessly indifferent.