Hearn's--New York City no number 1955

This is Robert Frank's contact sheet, "Hearn's--New York City no number." Just imagine, a full roll of film, maybe shot in a day, all these moments caught, and they are all a kind of painting! All these folks shopping, looking, buying… In that red circle, I see a transaction. A man looking at a print with a serious face, maybe thinking of buying it. You can feel Frank trying to make sense of how people make choices, what they value. Maybe he thought about that a lot, especially when making photos. And look at the sequence: the repetition of images, the slight variations, it all shows this process of looking. It's like, the artist is saying: “Look, this is what it’s like to see, to choose, to live.” Robert Frank saw photography as a place to wonder about all of that. You can also find similar ideas about this subject in the works of Garry Winogrand.