London 1952

Robert Frank made this photograph, “London,” with a camera, of course, and a great eye for tone. The scene is full of cars, with the kind of dark tonality that suggests a city on the brink. Just the tiniest bit claustrophobic, right? I can imagine Frank seeing this scene and feeling an urge to capture it. The driver in the mid-ground car seems to be watching us, or maybe he's waiting for someone. I wonder what Frank was thinking when he clicked the shutter. Was he trying to say something about urban life, about class, about waiting? I think of other photographers like Helen Levitt, who were also drawn to the gritty poetry of city life. There’s a connection, a shared language of observation and feeling. Artists are always talking to each other across time. Photography is a way of expressing the ambiguous and uncertain. It’s like painting in that way. Frank offers us a slice of life, but it's up to us to decide what it means.