Café, Paris 1951

Robert Frank made this gelatin silver print called "Café, Paris" sometime in the twentieth century. It's a photograph of a café table, seen through the glass, with a vase of tulips and what looks like a small cake with the name Raphael on it. I can imagine Frank wandering around Paris, camera in hand, trying to capture the feeling of the place. This photograph is so casual. It's the kind of image you could easily walk right past. But he saw something in that little cake and those flowers, the way they sit there on the table. Maybe it was the light, or the way the scene is framed by the window. The print is small, and the tones are soft and muted. It feels intimate, like a personal snapshot. To me it's so painterly, not in a grand way, but more like a Morandi. It's about the beauty of the everyday, finding poetry in the ordinary. And like all good images, it leaves you with a question mark, wondering what the story is behind that table and that cake, and what it means.