After the Rose Bowl Parade--Pasadena, California 1956

This photograph by Robert Frank captures a street in Pasadena, California, sometime after the Rose Bowl Parade, transformed into a landscape of discarded paper. I can almost feel what Frank felt, standing there amidst the confetti and debris, his camera becoming an extension of his eye, a tool for translating the emotional tenor of the scene into visual language. There’s something about the contrast between the woman on the sidewalk and the passing cars, the piano shop and the bunting for the Tournament of Roses—as if the whole world is split in two. The parade has gone, and the leftovers are all that's left: paper, a woman on the curb, and the ghost of a party. Robert Frank was so good at capturing ghosts. Frank’s work feels deeply connected to other image makers like Garry Winogrand, and Diane Arbus. He was in conversation with them, capturing fleeting moments of modern life with a disarming simplicity.