Paris 16B 1951 - 1952

This is Robert Frank’s ‘Paris 16B,’ a monochrome photograph made sometime in the middle of the last century. It is made up of small frames of film, strung together, with images of cars and people, with the Eiffel tower in multiple frames. There is something in the way that he has captured the Eiffel Tower here, this monument to ingenuity and engineering, as a series of similar images, taken maybe seconds apart. The images get darker, the composition shifts as we move down the frame. The dark tone of the photograph feels melancholic, like the record of an event or a lived moment. I look at this and I think about Warhol’s silkscreens, or even Muybridge’s experiments in motion. There is a feeling of the mechanical, or the serial, a kind of ‘copy, copy, copy’ attitude. Frank is not just reproducing an image of the tower, but also revealing the limitations of the camera.