Atlantic City, New Jersey no number 1955

Robert Frank made this sheet of photographs in 1955, probably with a small Leica camera and 35mm film. It's a contact sheet, so each little rectangle is the size of the negative. I like the way Frank doesn't crop too much, or try to hide the edges. It shows the choices he made, the order in which he saw things. Look at how the whole sheet is gridded, a matrix of possible moments. It’s kind of like painting, you know? The frame is a limit, but within that, anything can happen. The boardwalk scenes are pretty classic, people milling around, but there's also more abstract stuff, and then that handwritten '1955' scrawled on the surface. It reminds you of the hand of the artist, a human touch. Frank's work changed photography forever, it made it more personal, more like a diary. Think of Garry Winogrand, or Nan Goldin, they all owe something to Frank's way of seeing. It's like he said, "I'm just gonna show you what I see, and you can make up your own mind about it."