Cowboys VI 1954

Robert Frank’s 'Cowboys VI', is a photo strip, dark and grainy, probably shot on the street with a 35mm camera. It's raw. I get the sense of Frank wandering around and something catches his eye - these cowboys - so he shoots a whole roll of them. Click, click, click, documenting the scene with a kind of detached curiosity. There's a spontaneity here, an almost reckless abandon. It reminds me of the way painters like Joan Mitchell or Cy Twombly would attack a canvas, trying to capture something fleeting and visceral. You can imagine him, his eye pressed to the viewfinder, trying to distill some essence of Americanness, these cowboys embodying a certain rugged individualism. He’s part of a longer conversation about representation, like the one we painters are constantly having about how to capture a feeling, an idea, a moment in time. It’s all about seeing and feeling. And it's never really over.