Guggenheim 490--Twentieth Century Fox film studio, Burbank, California 1956

Robert Frank made this contact sheet, 'Guggenheim 490--Twentieth Century Fox film studio, Burbank, California', using gelatin silver print. It’s all about the film, and in this case, it's literally film, a strip of images in miniature, like a memory reel. The texture of the image is so sharp, with an indexical quality, we know these images were actually ‘there’. I can see the perforations along the side of the film strip, it makes it feel like I could reach out and touch it. Frank is showing us the means of production. The red markings feel conversational, like he's in dialogue with the images, circling and connecting them. Look at the bottom strip, the lone figures on the stage. It makes me think of the paintings of Edward Hopper, that same sense of loneliness and alienation. But here it’s also about the machinery of image making, the studio, the set, the lights. Frank’s work, like that of Garry Winogrand, embraces the messy, the accidental, and the off-kilter. It's about finding beauty in the everyday and revealing the hidden poetry of the world around us.