Children and family no number Possibly 1954

Robert Frank made this contact sheet of gelatin silver prints, showing a family, likely sometime in the mid-twentieth century. These strips of images, direct from the negative, speak to the labor of photography. It isn't just about the decisive moment, but the editing process. The careful selection that lies behind any photographic project. Here, Frank lets us see the outtakes, the variations, the raw material from which a final image might be chosen. We see his working method. Even the sprocket holes on the film have a meaning. They are a direct reference to the mechanical process of image making, an index of the camera itself. The final prints from these negatives would have been carefully cropped and toned. Yet Frank invites us to see the bigger picture, asking us to consider not just the image, but the whole system of production and selection that brings photographs into being.