Guggenheim 689--Political rally, Butte, Montana 1956

This is Robert Frank’s contact sheet ‘Guggenheim 689--Political rally, Butte, Montana’. Just imagine Robert Frank at the political rally, the smell of stale cigarette smoke, the dull murmur of the crowd, the flash of his camera bulb. I like the way contact sheets give you a peek behind the scenes, a sense of all the decisions and near misses that go into making one photograph. It reminds me of the studio, where you make so many versions to get to something solid. Frank's photos have a gritty texture, born from the darks and lights of each frame. In the centre of the sheet, the cropped frames show an audience of faces looking in one direction; a sea of bodies merged into a single entity. You can imagine his perspective, catching and selecting different focal lengths and angles, playing with foreground and background. Painters often talk about the conversations between artists across generations; here we get to listen in on a great photographer figuring out how to see the world.