Guggenheim 495A--"Helen of Troy" premiere, Los Angeles 1956

This contact sheet was made by Robert Frank, showing the premiere of "Helen of Troy" in Los Angeles. It’s like a storyboard, but more raw, less polished. The high contrast, the way the light bleeds into the dark, that’s Frank’s signature. It’s all about the process; the grain is the texture here. There’s a kind of frantic energy, a voyeuristic feel. The red lines scratched across it, it's an interesting addition of a mark. Look at how the faces emerge from the gloom, or just dissolve into it. It’s this back-and-forth between presence and absence that really gets me. Like de Kooning and his women, these images are there and then not there. The sequence feels related to the work of someone like Duane Michals, especially his narrative sequences. The real story here is not Helen, but the mystery of what we see, and how we see it.