Guggenheim 317--Arkansas 1955

Robert Frank made this contact sheet, *Guggenheim 317--Arkansas*, likely around the same time he was working on *The Americans*, that pivotal book of photographs. It shows us his process and a sense of the rhythms of his shooting, which in this case are organized in tight rows, like a musical score, full of incident. What's great about seeing a contact sheet is that it lays bare all of the choices that went into making a single image. There's a real physicality to this object, with its dark blacks and silvery, translucent grays. I can almost smell the chemicals. Take a look at the fourth row down, at the trio of frames. Frank is getting closer and closer to the subjects, moving in to steal their souls! I think of artists like Garry Winogrand, who also embraced the idea of photography as a sequence, a flow of images that captured the messy, unscripted nature of life. With Frank, as with Winogrand, you get a sense of the photographer as a kind of restless wanderer, always searching.