From the bus 8 1958

Robert Frank shot this contact sheet, From the bus 8, using black and white film, and what grabs me is how he transforms the everyday into something visually poetic. Look at the composition, or rather, the multiple compositions laid out before us. Each frame is a little world, a fleeting moment captured. But it’s the spaces between the frames, the dark lines of the film strip, that create a rhythm. Your eye bounces around, making connections and contrasts between the images. There’s a rawness here, a sense of immediacy. It reminds me of the way Kurt Schwitters used found materials in his collages – Frank uses the 'mistakes', the blurry frames, the uneven exposures to create a feeling of lived experience. The red marks, presumably made by Frank himself, act as a kind of a painterly intervention. They emphasize the work as a process and suggest he is actively engaging with the material. It’s a reminder that art-making is about seeing and feeling. It is never about perfection.