Gezicht op een kerk in Aix-les-Bains 1903

Delizy's 'View of a Church in Aix-les-Bains' is this small photograph, an unassuming brown study, which captures a moment, like life passing through your fingers. The monochrome palette—sepia tones—creates this flattened effect, like looking back through time. The surface is smooth, which almost adds to its unreality, but then the composition: the artist includes these trees in the foreground. A building is only partly visible. The framing is as important as the subject, bringing a sense of the present to the image. If you look at the way the clock tower rises, with the details of the clock face and the dome at the top, it creates this sense of height, but the surrounding buildings give it a more human scale. It reminds me of some of the early street photography of Eugène Atget, a similar approach to capturing a place in its everyday existence. Art is about finding the extraordinary in the ordinary, and this piece does that so well.