Family and Karen--New York City no number 1954

This is Robert Frank’s “Family and Karen--New York City no number,” a photographic work, but it looks more like a painter’s panel of studies. He uses multiple strips of film, like a painter uses color charts; Frank lays them out like he’s testing a range of emotional registers. The grey scale here is beautiful, from light to dark, like he's working through a thought. The repeated images of the girl, Karen, seem to offer both presence and absence simultaneously. You find yourself focusing on her gaze, or the way she is framed in each shot, as Frank experiments with light and shadow to change the mood. It reminds me of some of Gerhard Richter's serial works, where repetition and slight variation become a way of exploring how we perceive reality, memory, and the passage of time. In both cases, you feel that art is less about answers and more about the questions we ask. It's an open-ended conversation that we're all invited to join.