Guggenheim 51/Americans 80--Ann Arbor, Michigan 1955

Curator: Immediately striking are the contrasts, the black and white film, the hard edges of the celluloid strips framing each tiny image of mid-century America. It has the look of a historical document. Editor: Precisely. This is “Guggenheim 51/Americans 80—Ann Arbor, Michigan” by Robert Frank, dated 1955. The medium is gelatin silver print, showcasing Frank’s gritty, unconventional style. Curator: There’s something inherently voyeuristic in seeing the contact sheet – a look behind the curtain. The red marks draw our eyes to what the photographer considered worth developing further. Do you agree? Editor: Absolutely. And look closer. There’s an abundance of cars. Statues on plinths, implying some notion of civic virtue or leadership. Buildings—establishments, institutions. People at leisure. Taken together, these things might evoke postwar prosperity. Curator: Maybe, but filtered through Frank’s lens, that prosperity feels a little…hollow. He isolates scenes of everyday life but the images don’t feel joyful, even when they depict leisure activities. Is he pointing towards a more unsettling truth about American life? Editor: That’s where the symbolic weight lies for me. The car, so prominent here, as both a symbol of freedom and an instrument of conformity. Look at the figures, they often face away, obscured or distanced, as though already fading from a collective memory not yet fully formed. The grainy quality adds to a feeling of fragility, of ephemerality. Curator: The sequencing too, the contact sheet arrangement suggests randomness. It’s a decisive moment made all the more ambiguous by the choices Frank seems to have *not* made. He’s less interested in definitive statements, it appears, than posing uncomfortable questions. Editor: Precisely. Ultimately it seems to question what we remember, and why certain images resonate when so many others fade away into the stream of the everyday. Curator: Indeed, a single piece of celluloid containing an echo of collective memory and American social history. Editor: An evocative collection, for sure.