After the Rose Bowl Parade--Pasadena, California
1956
Image not available — this artwork is under copyright
View on museum website →Medium
gelatin silver print
Dimensions
sheet: 25.2 x 20.3 cm (9 15/16 x 8 in.)
Classification
Photograph
Department
CPH
Museum
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Credit
Robert Frank Collection, Gift of Robert Frank
Accession Number
1990.28.714
Art Historical Context
In the bustling aftermath of Pasadena's iconic Rose Bowl Parade, Robert Frank captures a fleeting moment of post-celebration disarray in his 1956 gelatin silver print *After the Rose Bowl ParadePasadena, California*. Frank, a Swiss-born photographer who became a defining voice in mid-20th-century American photography, took this image during his transformative cross-country road trip funded by a Guggenheim Fellowship. Part of the series that culminated in his groundbreaking 1958 book *The Americans*, the photograph reveals the gritty underbelly of 1950s optimism, contrasting the parade's festiv...
About the Artist
Robert Frank
Robert Frank (1924-2019) was a Swiss-American photographer and documentary filmmaker whose revolutionary approach to documentary photography fundamentally transformed the medium and influenced generations of artists. Born in Zurich, Switzerland, on November 9, 1924, to a middle-class Jewish family, Frank began his photographic apprenticeship in 1941, working with commercial photographers before im...