Escape artist banner, circus--Houston, Texas 1955

This black and white photograph of an escape artist banner, circus in Houston, Texas, was captured by Robert Frank sometime in the mid-twentieth century. The banner itself is a kind of painting, an advertisement for the spectacle within. It’s all about anticipation and drama. Look at the texture of the banner, the way the paint seems thin and almost transparent in places. You can almost feel the weave of the canvas underneath, which gives it this raw, immediate quality. The banner, like the photograph, has captured a moment in time. The word ‘Alive’ seems so precarious in the face of the escape artists impossible trick. The circus is, and always has been a place of blurred boundaries. Frank, like other photographers such as Garry Winogrand, was interested in the theater of everyday life, that is to say, the extraordinary things to be found in ordinary places.