On ship--New York to Paris 1 1949

Robert Frank made this photographic contact sheet titled 'On ship—New York to Paris 1’ sometime around the middle of the last century. What grabs me is the raw materiality of the piece; it’s not just about the images, but the object itself. Look at the tears, the scratches, and that vivid red slash cutting across the frames! It’s like Frank is saying, "Here's the messy, imperfect reality of making art.” It’s a document of a journey and of the artist's process. The photos themselves, grainy and full of contrast, capture fleeting moments on a ship. Each frame feels like a memory, a fragmented glimpse of a world in transit. That red slash—is it anger? Is it passion? It’s a way of disrupting and re-animating the image. Like Rauschenberg erasing a de Kooning, or Lucio Fontana slashing a canvas; its destruction as creation. It makes me think about art as conversation, a continuous dialogue between artists across time.