Guggenheim 629--San Francisco c. 1956

This is Guggenheim 629--San Francisco, by Robert Frank, using photography, but presented as a material object. It’s a contact sheet; like a painter's palette, it lets you see the range of possibilities, the starts and stops. The whole thing has an inky, grainy feel. It’s raw. Look at the third row, the fourth image from the left, there’s a dark silhouette of a figure against a bright sky. You get the feeling that Frank just grabbed this shot on the fly. It's not about perfection, but about capturing a moment. There are so many ways to read this, and it makes me think of the work of Garry Winogrand, who also seemed to just grab images from the world, without pretense. Both of them give us a sense of the world as a fragmented, messy, beautiful place. It's like they're saying, "Here it is, take it or leave it." And I, for one, am happy to take it.