What We Have Seen

Robert Frank

Info: Zander Galerie is pleased to announce an exhibition that brings to life the visual narrative of What We Have Seen / Was Haben Wir Gesehen from Robert Frank’s celebrated series of visual diaries. It explores people and places across his long and multifaceted life through images and fragments of memory presented through the artist’s original maquette. The exhibition has been realized in close collaboration with the Robert Frank Foundation and reconstructs the image sequence as conceived by the artist. What We Have Seen / Was Haben Wir Gesehen was published by Steidl in 2016 and belongs to Robert Frank’s late group of photobooks that function as visual diaries. The work brings together photographs, fragments, handwritten words, and recurring motifs, moving between different times and places in Frank’s life. Rather than following a linear narrative, the sequence characteristically unfolds as a rhythm of memory and perception. Images of friends and family, everyday surroundings, travel, and loss are interwoven with textual elements and repetitions, emphasizing the act of looking back and the passage of time. The maquette reveals the book as a carefully constructed visual composition, in which sequencing, intervals, and echoes are as significant as the individual images themselves. (…)