Horse--Animals 1941 - 1945

This small, silvery photograph, *Horse—Animals*, was made by Robert Frank sometime in the mid-twentieth century. I love that it’s a fragment, a quickly captured view of a horse-drawn carriage crossing a snowy landscape. You can almost feel Frank trying to make something coherent from the muddle. It's like he's thinking, “How can I lasso this moment, this feeling?” He’s out there in the cold with his camera and trying to wrangle the world into something meaningful. I know that feeling. The softness of the light and the graininess of the print gives the scene a kind of wistful, dreamlike quality. You can feel the silence and the cold of the winter day. Frank is known for his gritty, sometimes unsettling imagery, but here, there’s a quiet beauty. It reminds me that artists are always showing each other different ways to see, to feel, to be in the world.