On Saturday and Sunday the street is empty. Georgie is alone. 1951

Robert Frank captured this image, ‘On Saturday and Sunday the street is empty. Georgie is alone,’ with a camera, sometime during his life between 1924 and 2019. It’s a pretty straightforward shot, right? A child stands alone, in the middle of a deserted city street. But the gray tones are so evocative. It feels like Frank is letting the light do the work, allowing it to wash over the scene and shape our perception. Look closely at the surface. The graininess adds a layer of texture, almost like a memory fading at the edges. There’s this incredible balance between clarity and blur, focus and ambiguity, that gives the photo its emotional punch. The way the buildings loom in the background, dwarfing the figure of the child, really speaks to feelings of isolation. Frank's images share a visual language with that of Garry Winogrand, who like Frank was able to capture the feelings of contemporary life with an intuitive eye. It's a reminder that art doesn’t always have to scream; sometimes, it whispers the loudest.