Carnival--Basel no number 1952

Robert Frank’s ‘Carnival--Basel no number’ is a series of photographs printed on a contact sheet, a format where the negative strip is printed directly onto photographic paper at the same size as the negative. The grainy, high-contrast black and white images remind me of early filmmaking, where the quality of the image is less important than capturing a moment. Frank's work isn’t about technical perfection; it's about feeling. Look at the variety of shots, some overexposed, some blurry – like a series of half-remembered dreams. I am drawn to the strip in the middle, a figure wearing a striped shirt. They are present across several frames, each image slightly different, like a flip-book animation. This sequence lends a rhythm to the image, reflecting the movement and chaos of a carnival. It also reminds me of the work of Edweard Muybridge whose photographic studies of movement also broke action down into sequences. With Frank, as with Muybridge, the overall effect is to ask questions about the nature of time and representation. Is there such a thing as a perfect image?