Guggenheim 71/Detroit 7 1955

This is Robert Frank’s "Guggenheim 71/Detroit 7," a collage of photographs. It feels like a raw, immediate process, like a painter’s working study. There’s a real tactile quality to this piece. Frank isn’t trying to hide the seams, or the edges of the film, in fact the black plastic dividers between the images are integral to the composition. There are even marks in red grease pencil that look like the artist's edits, showing us how he's looking and thinking. My eye is drawn to the contrast between the bright, almost exploding, cityscapes with their twinkling lights and the darker interior spaces with people playing pinball. The city scenes are full of movement, while the pinball shots focus on static figures. There’s a beautiful relationship between the rhythm of the individual images and the whole piece. Frank's work is an important influence on so many artists working today and remains a reminder that photography is about seeing, feeling, and assembling fragments to try and capture a sense of the world around us.