Zurich 1945

This photograph, Zurich, by Robert Frank, captures a crowd scene, likely sometime in the mid-20th century, with what looks like a protest or gathering in front of a grand, gothic building. What strikes me is the density of the image, the way Frank crams so much information into a small frame. It's a bit like when I'm painting and I keep adding layers, obscuring what's underneath, until the whole thing feels both chaotic and resolved. There's a banner, and a sea of faces, each with their own story, their own reasons for being there. The monochrome palette adds to this sense of compression, turning everything into a field of grays and blacks. Look at the faces, they emerge from the grainy texture. It reminds me of how the German artist Gerhard Richter uses blur in his paintings to convey a sense of memory and transience. Frank is doing something similar here, using the graininess of the film to suggest the fleeting nature of the moment, the way a crowd is always in flux, always changing. What is so great about art is that it doesn’t have to have all the answers. It leaves space for us to think and feel.