Times Square--New York City 9 c. 1961

Robert Frank made this contact sheet, Times Square—New York City 9, with gelatin silver print. It shows the materiality of photography as a process. The many small frames on a larger sheet gives us a sense of a before and after, a time frame. The marks are the frames themselves, and the starkness of the black and white tones, alluding to the idea of the photograph as a record, a document of the everyday. But the sheet is not the end result, it is a piece of paper which has the marks of selection and rejection. There are red outlines of frames, the trace of someone’s hand. The contrast between the different moments in the frames and the final selection reminds me of the way Jasper Johns would take everyday objects and enshrine them in art, both mundane and monumental. Frank shows us that art is about the choices we make about what we see.