San Gennaro festival--New York City no number 1953

This is Robert Frank’s film contact sheet of New York City’s San Gennaro festival. I imagine Frank wandering through the festival with his camera, a silent observer, capturing fragments of the bustling street. These aren’t posed portraits but rather glimpses into the everyday, moments snatched from the flow of life. The black and white gives it this timeless quality, like a memory half-faded but still vivid, don’t you think? Each frame is a mini-narrative, a slice of the festival's atmosphere – the blurred lights, the crowd scenes, the umbrellas cutting through the rainy night. I am drawn to the way the images are arranged on the sheet, it is a sequence that has been marked with a large cross. It makes me think about the selection process, the choices Frank made, the constant push and pull between what to include and what to discard. It is a reminder that every photograph, every artwork, is a product of countless decisions, revisions, and hesitations. It's like a conversation across time, Frank to us, and us back to him, pondering the stories these images hold, and maybe even finding a piece of ourselves within them.