Rue de la Sablière--Paris 49A/Lines of My Hand 29 1949 - 1950

This is Robert Frank’s ‘Rue de la Sablière--Paris 49A/Lines of My Hand 29’, probably made with a handheld camera, sometime around 1949. I imagine Frank on the streets of Paris, seeing, recording, moving on. He's using the camera to find something. What is it? Truth? Beauty? A way to communicate? The filmstrip is his canvas, the city his studio. Each frame, a moment captured, a story hinted at. A street scene, children playing, a solitary figure in the distance, a kind of catalogue of the ephemeral. I feel like he's showing us his working process. There’s a rawness to it, an immediacy. It feels like it's about not just what he saw but how he saw it. I love how he shares these lines of inquiry in his hand with us. His gaze makes me think about the tradition of street photography, and how artists like Helen Levitt and Garry Winogrand were also capturing these fleeting moments of everyday life. We're all out there looking, seeing, trying to make sense of it all.