Parc de Versaille bosquet de la Colonnade 1905

This is Eugène Atget’s photograph, Parc de Versailles, bosquet de la Colonnade, made with a simple camera and lens, somewhere around the turn of the 20th century. It's kind of like a sketch, right? The light in this print is pretty amazing – it's soft and diffuse, and it wraps around those grand old columns, making them look both solid and ghostly at the same time. I love the way the fountain basins fade into the background, and the way the bare trees beyond feel almost like they're part of the architecture. There’s a tactile quality to the light that makes you want to reach out and touch the stone. There’s something both romantic and melancholic about Atget’s work. It's as if he's showing us the grandeur of the past, but also reminding us that everything fades. I wonder if he was looking at Corot's landscapes. Either way, he knew that art can be many things at once, and that ambiguity is something to embrace.