Cross-country skiers--Sports 1941 - 1945

Robert Frank made this photograph, Cross-country skiers--Sports, with a camera, sometime during his life, and printed it on a small rectangular sheet. The composition gives us a receding line of figures, each skier smaller than the last, mirroring how we perceive depth with our own eyes. I'm struck by the way Frank’s choice of grayscale renders the scene both stark and dreamlike. The grainy texture, almost palpable, feels like the sting of wind and snow. Notice how the light catches the figure closest to us: the texture of their glove and the weave of their jacket, all so solid and real, even though we don't see the skier's face. The blank sky presses down on them, erasing the mountain top. This picture reminds me of some of Gerhard Richter's blurry landscapes, where the act of looking becomes as important as what is being looked at. Like Richter, Frank embraces the ambiguity of his medium, and invites us to bring our own stories to the slopes.