Playground--Florida 8 1958

Robert Frank made this photo, Playground--Florida 8, using film and a camera; it's a series of images, a contact sheet, really, laid out like a storyboard. There's something about seeing the raw edges of the film, the sprocket holes and the Kodak markings, that makes me feel like I’m looking over Frank’s shoulder, watching his process unfold. He's not hiding anything, you know? There’s a tree circled in red grease pencil, a simple mark, but it tells you where his eye lingered, what caught his attention. I keep thinking about that tree. How it stands there, framed by the other images, a quiet witness. In a way it reminds me of the way Cy Twombly circled or highlighted lines of poetry in his notebooks - like he's communing with something special and wants to remember why it's so captivating. And isn’t that what art is all about, this ongoing conversation, this sharing of seeing?