Guggenheim 117--Jay, New York VII 1954

Robert Frank made 'Guggenheim 117--Jay, New York VII' using gelatin silver print photography. I love how Frank leaves the film strip intact. It's such a reminder that images are made in a temporal sequence, not magically conjured. He's showing us the before, during, and after, the stuff that usually ends up on the cutting room floor. The way he crops and frames these images is so intuitive and immediate. Look at how the graininess of the black and white film almost dissolves the figures into abstraction, but then he pulls you back in with the sharp details of a face or a flag. The red ‘VII’ scrawled over the bottom images feels like a private annotation. This work puts me in mind of other photographers who play with the serial image, like Duane Michals. But Frank's got this raw, documentary edge that makes it feel more like a diary entry than a staged narrative. Art can be the diary of the artist, a record of experience.