At the opening of the Robert Frank show at the Met

(I want to get this experience down before I lose it or try to make it better.)

The opening of the Robert Frank show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York last night provoked unexpected thoughts in me—and exhilarating ones. Openings are seldom the best opportunity to see work, but I knew hardly anyone at all there, so I was free to go down the walls slowly without having to stop and talk to people while trying to remember their names.

I’ve gone to other shows of work that moved me early on in my career, and it is often a bit of a let-down…not always, but  often enough. I've looked at the work of canonical figures and thought, Well...it's okaay..

But I didn’t think that would happen at this show. For one thing, the work has stayed so visible over time that there has been no gap in my awareness of it. For another, it landed on me really hard back then. In fact, as I went through the photos I felt that some were so in me that  it was as though I had taken them. That thought was so antic that I began to entertain it.

And that led me to shift back in time and remember just how the pictures had worked on me when I saw them first. At that time, around 1970, The Americans has passed through its confused first reception and was beginning to be seen as the radical and compelling entity that it was.

But what I remember is that when I first looked at the work I was seeing in it things that were very familiar. I could go out and take pictures of these things myself (and did). There were people everywhere like the people in Franks pictures. There was also grainy Tri-X film,  and of course there were Black and White.

Of course, that's just subject and materials. What I was really after then, whether I knew it or not (I didn't),  was not what was in Frank's awareness, but the awareness itself.

Imagine my excitement last night, as I moved through the show and was once again overtaken by that old sense of possibility that I could take pictures like that. Or like my own. That was what worked on me  when I first saw The Americans, and it came back last night.

There was much else to learn from those pictures and from Franks other work---the lyrical movement of the offhand composition, the sense of something about to happen just after the photo was taken. And in time there was the example he set of not getting enmired in what you had done, not if you wanted to keep moving on.

Jeff Rosenheim, who curated the current show, said that for him encountering the work was like encountering an old lover. For me it was more complex and a bit odder than that. It  was like encountering an old lover who hadn’t changed one bit, and beginning to think that perhaps I hadn’t either. Knowing, of course, that that would be absurd. Then thinking...but maybe not.