Peru 21 1948

Robert Frank's “Peru 21” is a contact sheet, the raw material of photography, a matrix of moments. It is a map of seeing, an index of looking. I imagine Frank in Peru, camera in hand, trying to distill a place, a feeling, a truth, into these little black and white rectangles. What was he searching for? What caught his eye? Those faces wrapped in cloth, the endless landscape. Look at the way he frames the figures against the stark, open land. There’s a tension between intimacy and distance. Each frame offers a fleeting glimpse into a world, a story, a life. The red marks on the film are like scars or sutures, holding these fragments together. Painters are always looking at photography, at film, trying to capture that same sense of immediacy and truth. Frank’s work reminds me that seeing is a process of selection, of framing, of editing, a kind of conversation between the artist and the world.