Gallery Review- Looking in: Robert Franks The Americans

For this gallery review i decided to kill 2 birds with one stone. my art history class, architecture and society in england, took a trip to the MET, so i used this time to browse the Robert Franks photography show. this blog is going to boarder line as one of the blogs where i talk about how i did not like the gallery i visited. most of the work did not intrigue me nor captivate me as such gallery visits in the past have. for this visit i enjoyed the organization and layout of the show more then the work itself. as i walked through the show viewing the photographs in sequential order of 1 through 83 of Franks series titled The Americans, i found it hard to find any images that i really feel in love with or ones that struck me as captivating. from reading the wall captions or title wall (again another title wall i enjoyed, it must be the large text in paragraph form on a large wall, i dont really know... i like title walls ) i realize the series is more about the time in history he was taking the images and the way in which he traveled and made a more photographic documentary, but it just didnt wow me. a few things i did enjoy were: title wall, contact sheets, picture frames, layout of show. the contact sheets i found to be more beautiful than most of the images. i think this is because it shows more of the process, the process in picking out which images works best or says what Frank wanted said. as a photographer you take numerous extra pictures not quite sure which one will work the best, this is why the contact sheet is so important. i helps you find the "it" picture. i think this is why i enjoyed the red wax pen on the black and white contact sheet. the pen juxtaposes colors to represent the "it" photo being found. the picture frames i liked because they displayed the photos in a clean cut manner on the white walls of the gallery space. the frames didnt appear out of place or awkward in relation to the photos displayed inside them. i think the black frames and white lighting helped give color to the black and white images, i think the lighting helped to bring out the tones within the images. i enjoyed the layout of the show, yet it seemed long but theres 83 images so the display space has to be long. but the way you follow the images from 1 to 83 around walls through rooms, interacting with other viewers give the feeling of a journey. this journey relates to the one Frank's took while photographing the American landscape. the last thing that struck me as i traveled through the gallery space was the different colors in race that were captured within the images. the journey shown in the images starts with colored people but around image #65 the images start to show and are made up of more white people. im not sure if this was just by chance or something that Frank's deliberately did in his work, shift from one race to the next. more importantly i feel though it does show and represent the social and racial issues of this time in the Americas, but i wonder if race and color of the photographed area/scenes have changed, would these same scenes still look this way if photographed today?