Robert Frank's Crappy Contact Sheets

There are many, many reasons to see Robert Frank's "Looking In" exhibit, currently at the Metropolitan Museum until early January. I actually had to take my time to go there, knowing that the experience would be large and perhaps overwhelming. It was almost holy to walk in and see his large prints, his words, his book layouts and most importantly, his crappy contact sheets.

A word of explanation. I have spent more than half my life with my hands in chemicals in the darkroom. Although some of my work is now relegated to the digital realm, I consider my B&W work to be what keeps me honest and it is a regular part of my photographic practice.

I have always been at odds with the extreme ugliness of my contact sheets. The film itself is always carefully tended to, but the contacts are a formality. I've gotten to the point where I know my film so well that I can just hold it up to the light to know what I want to print and I sometimes bypass the contact sheet process entirely. It is tedious, repetitive and too much work to make the exposures look good. So I save my time for the prints themselves, using the contacts only as a muddy point of first reference.

So I've ended up with thousands of bad contact sheets. I use them, but the thought of ever allowing someone else to see them has been mortifying, up until now. I always felt like I would be exposed as a printing fraud if I were ever found out.

In looking at Robert Frank's contact sheets, put up on the undeniable artistic pedestal that is the Metropolitan Museum, I felt a palpable sense of relief to realize that his contact sheets were crappy too. Crooked. Upside down, too light, too dark, even out of focus. Yet the prints he yielded from them were gorgeous.

I intuitively knew seeing his show would inspire me. But never did I imagine that something I have been self conscious about for so many years would be validated. I humbly thank Mr. Frank for a lesson about not worrying about the process....only the outcome.