Paris 12 1959

Robert Frank's photographic artwork, Paris 12, is a strip of negatives, a sequence of moments captured and arranged. You can imagine Frank on the streets of Paris, camera in hand, moving through the city with a hunger to collect images. It is like seeing an artist’s working process, the contact sheet revealing their choices, editing, and the bits they discarded. The city unfolds in a series of glimpses. What was he thinking as he shot these frames, turning the world into a composition of light and shadow? What story was he trying to piece together from these fragments? The high contrast and grainy texture give the images a raw, immediate feel. Frank had a way of getting beneath the surface, using the camera to ask, to probe, to disrupt. There’s a connection between Frank’s approach and the work of street photographers like Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus, all of them searching for truth in the everyday, finding beauty and unease in equal measure. It's a reminder of the ongoing dialogue between artists, each one building on the work of those who came before.