Parc de Sceaux 1925

This photograph, Parc de Sceaux, was captured by Eugène Atget, using what looks like a simple camera, with no special effects. You know, sometimes it's the ordinary things that hit you hardest. I love the way Atget frames the stone steps leading up to that sculpture. The sepia tones give everything a kind of dreamy, timeless feel. Look at the moss growing on the stairs and the way the light catches the edges of the stone. It's like he's saying, "Hey, even the most solid stuff changes, softens, gets a little fuzzy around the edges." I like how the steps invite you to climb up but the dark trees on the left feel almost foreboding, which creates a real sense of tension. Atget reminds me a bit of Bernd and Hilla Becher, those German photographers who obsessively documented industrial structures. Both are interested in cataloguing and preserving, but Atget has got this poetry, this quiet melancholy, that just gets me right here. Art isn't about answers. It's about feeling your way through the questions.