Venice, Italy 2 1964

This is "Venice, Italy 2" by Robert Frank, a gelatin silver print on paper. What strikes me about this piece is how Frank presents the raw material of photography itself: the film strip. It's like he’s saying, "Here's the evidence, the stuff that pictures are made of." The texture is inherent to the medium, glossy and smooth where the light hits the paper, grainy and contrast-y in the images themselves. It's a document of a moment, but also a document of the process. Look at the contact sheet, the red markings, the way he’s circled certain frames. The images themselves seem to bleed into one another. This messiness, this lack of a perfect image, is what makes the work so compelling. It reminds me a little of Gerhard Richter’s blurred photographs, the way he embraces chance and imperfection. It’s about the journey, not just the destination. It's an embrace of ambiguity, where the real story lies not in what we see, but in how we see it.