Guggenheim 619--San Francisco c. 1956

Editor: Robert Frank’s "Guggenheim 619--San Francisco," a gelatin silver print from around 1956, feels like a film strip capturing fleeting moments. The repetition and almost dreamlike quality of the reversed images in the last rows have got me hooked, like memories half-remembered. How would you read into this collage? Curator: It’s funny you call it dreamlike, I tend to agree; perhaps it is because he challenges our concept of place with shifting points of view, which ultimately makes it not “real”. And these glimpses… they're not just documentation. Look at how the mundane is elevated – people walking, getting into cars, visiting monuments. Do you think Frank is after a kind of ‘everyday epic’? Editor: An everyday epic? That’s beautifully put. The framing is almost accidental but in the best way. Curator: Exactly! It's the off-kilter, slightly blurry aesthetic which speaks to me. Not trying to sell us some manufactured glossiness. You know, the reversed images are like the dark side of the ‘American Dream’, perhaps the artist’s looking glass version, do you find that relatable? Editor: I hadn’t considered that it can be an active statement by Frank, but I like that a lot, yes! It’s like he’s not just showing us, he’s asking us to question what we see. Curator: Precisely. This single work by Frank manages to embrace beauty and ugliness within a frame, like capturing reality in its brutal but truthful version, but then it makes me wonder, how much is a work really able to achieve at once, you know? Editor: Right, and maybe that's the enduring power here, this picture poses more questions than answers.