Circus--New York City VIII 1952

Robert Frank made this gelatin silver print, Circus--New York City VIII, sometime in the last century. It's a chaotic contact sheet that almost feels like a storyboard for a Fellini film, a series of blurred, grainy moments hinting at the absurd theater of city life. The material quality is raw and immediate. Frank isn’t hiding the process; the sprocket holes and frame numbers are all there, a kind of anti-glamour that foregrounds the act of seeing itself. My eyes are drawn to the center, to that burst of light and movement, the circus ring with its suggestion of danger and performance, framed by the quiet darkness of the audience. It’s like a metaphor for the artist's position, both inside and outside the spectacle. Like Garry Winogrand, Frank captures the messy, unposed reality of the everyday. Both artists have a shared interest in the poetry of chance, the beauty in the accidental. You know, art doesn’t have to be slick, it just has to be true.