Weaver and wife, North Carolina--Various family S33 1948

This is Robert Frank’s contact sheet, ‘Weaver and wife, North Carolina,’ from his ‘Various family S33’ series. What Frank did with his camera back then reminds me of what I try to do with paint now—it feels like he was chasing something, an idea, a mood, or just some kind of feeling. He was like a method actor, but with a camera. Look at these snippets of faces, buildings, street scenes and landscapes. They create a visual poem with all the stops and starts, hesitations and leaps of faith. I imagine Frank wandering around, his camera always at the ready, grabbing these little bits of life as they came to him. Each shot feels like a quick sketch, a fleeting moment captured on film. There’s so much life packed into each little frame. You can see so much experimentation in Frank’s work, like he was in constant dialogue with other photographers. He’s testing out different ways of seeing, different ways of telling stories. It reminds you that art is just an ongoing conversation between artists, across time and space.