Conjuring Creative Permission from Our Tools
When Robert Frank finally sat down to divine his seminal photography book, The Americans, he had to sift through more than 28,000 images.
In Frank’s vast collection were snapshots of an America that had rarely before been caught on film: snaps of Manhattan cowboys sitting atop garbage cans, snaps of suspendered men in straw hats chatting in a courthouse square, snaps of teenagers making out on picnic cloths, snaps of a segregated trolley in New Orleans, snaps of a lone elevator-operator girl from within the elevator. Technically thematic between these snaps was the feeling that they were, indeed, snaps. Fewer slow compositions, more clandestine shots.
Frank produced those images over the course of a year and change, but this was in 1955 and 1956, the heady days of analog, back when taking a photo meant committing to a certain physicality, of affecting silver halide crystals with photons inside a box, and then developing and eventually printing those captures to see what was or wasn’t worthwhile. Today, individually we may capture hundreds of images in a single day—collectively billions, many ephemeral within apps like Snapchat—and see the results immediately, the cost of a shot having been whittled to essentially…
