Hallway--San Francisco 1956

Robert Frank made this photograph, Hallway--San Francisco, sometime in the mid-twentieth century. Look at the way the light falls on the wall, as if trying to capture the uncapturable—the dust and dirt of lived experience. I can imagine Frank wandering through train stations and bus depots, seeking a moment where the grit of daily life becomes unexpectedly beautiful. He seems to look for in-between spaces where the light suggests the possibility of transcendence, of finding something sacred in the mundane. What Frank does so well here, is show us how art exists in the periphery, as the residue of thought and feeling. Like a memory, it holds a poignant atmosphere of what once was and might be again.