Guggenheim 77/Americans 5--Detroit 1955

This contact sheet by Robert Frank is from his seminal series *The Americans*. You can see several strips of film, each a sequence of moments, like frames in a memory. There's something intimate about seeing these frames laid out; it's like peeking into Frank's mind, watching him choose which moments to immortalize, which to discard. The red marks that annotate some of the frames are like a painter’s underpainting, suggesting layers of intent. It’s almost like a sketchbook page. I imagine him in the darkroom, hunched over, squinting, and making decisions about the crop, the contrast, the narrative. What was he thinking when he circled that frame of a crowded parade? What did he want us to notice? These choices are what make the image sing, and they invite us to consider our own choices, our own frames, in how we experience the world.