I first heard the name Robert Frank while taking a portrait photo of Allen Ginsberg. He interrupted my shot and said, "My new Photography Guru Robert Frank told me to always include the head and the hands in the picture because they are both always naked."
Robert Frank knew what so many of us take years, through art or life, to discover: that 20/20 Vision (which leads to 20/20 thinking and 20/20 feeling) is a vast handicap and nowhere near the realm of perfect expression which is, in this realm, imperfect seeing or rather an isolated glance colored by the mood of the moment. The tones in Frank’s photograph controlled time itself and Frank was capable of writing with light and darkness, equally. It was as if he never separated them.
I have never seen a single mechanical mood in any of his images but I did see him, often, eliminate the split-second boundary between joy and pain as evident in “Couple / Paris / 1952." In that image there is the eyes-closed-ecstasy of public togetherness, as the couple sits in a moving go-cart rather than the clichéd public bench as was common in most photographs of the day.