Guggenheim 686--Blackfoot, Idaho 1956

Robert Frank made this contact sheet, Guggenheim 686--Blackfoot, Idaho, sometime in the middle of his career, using photographic negatives, tape, and red marker. It’s all about the process of editing, selecting images, and how the final form of a photograph is as much about what you leave out as what you include. The texture of the film, the grain, and the way the light falls across it, it's so immediate and raw. You can see the marks, the scratches, the dust, like the evidence of a life lived, or at least a day spent working hard in the darkroom. And that red marker, those crude circles and crosses, they feel so decisive, like a shout, ‘this one, not that one!’ My eyes dart all over, trying to decipher the artist’s intention. The bottom row, taped to the surface, gives you the sense of the artist trying out a variety of configurations to decide which one looked and felt the best. It's like he's pulling back the curtain, showing us how he makes meaning, not just capturing it. Like Rauschenberg's erased de Kooning, it’s about the gesture of taking away. This piece feels like a conversation with artists like those associated with Fluxus who questioned conventional artmaking, it's that spirit of experimentation and embracing chance, that makes Frank's work so compelling.