Subway 14 1955

This is ‘Subway 14,’ a photo by Robert Frank, and it’s a series of images on a single sheet. The grainy, high-contrast black and white feels immediate, like a snapshot of a passing moment. And that red circle! Someone has marked the sheet as if to say, this is the one to look at. The photos themselves seem to be of people waiting, sitting, traveling. There’s a kind of intimacy in the way Frank has captured these everyday moments. The texture of the film gives the images a gritty feel, which fits the urban environment. There's a strange tension between the individual frames and the sheet of film as a whole. It reminds me of Walker Evans, another photographer who found beauty in the mundane. But Frank's work has a rawness that's all his own. It’s like he's saying, ‘this is life, take it or leave it.’ And maybe that's what art is all about. Not trying to make things perfect, but showing them as they are.