Peru, page 20 1948

Robert Frank made this gelatin silver print, ‘Peru, page 20’, as part of his photographic book project. What strikes me here is the way the image has a strong compositional structure – it’s like a dance between light and shadow. The grayscale palette gives it a timeless, almost dreamlike quality, blurring the line between documentary and something more abstract. The image is split into two distinct parts. On the left, we have the bridge, a feat of engineering which is itself an interesting subject, and on the right, a more ‘conventional’ landscape shot with a winding road. The surface quality of the image feels really intimate and tactile. You can almost feel the grit of the film. The way Frank plays with the composition echoes the work of collage artists like Hannah Höch, where fragments of reality are pieced together to create something new and unexpected. There’s a sense of spontaneity and immediacy. This isn’t about perfection, but about capturing a moment, an impression. Art, like life, is an ongoing conversation.