“I stood in front of this particular photograph for probably a full five minutes, not knowing why I was staring at it,“ she says. “And then it really dawned on me that the girl in the picture was me.”
“Robert Frank took about four photos of me without a flash in the elevator. I didn’t know he was taking them. And then when the elevator emptied of its ‘blurred demons,’” she says, “he asked me to turn around and smile at the camera. And I flashed a smile, put my hands on my hips. I hammed it up for about eight or ten frames.
He saw in me something that most people didn’t see. I have a big smile and a big laugh, and I’m usually pretty funny. So people see one thing in me. And I suspect Robert Frank and Jack Kerouac saw something that was deeper. That only people who were really close to me can see. It’s not necessarily loneliness, it’s … dreaminess.”
Sharon Collins, on the photograph Robert Frank took of her in Miami Beach in 1955.
