Some time ago my wife bought me a folio of the pictures of Eugene Atget.
She probably did that for a variety of reasons, but one was that she knew I would be interested in seeing a volume of images of Paris taken a long time ago by a master.
I have been wandering the streets of Paris for several years taking pictures – one five month period’s images drove my digital image count on an out of the box new camera past 10,000 to 00000; seeing Monsieur Atget’s work was indeed a spiritual experience.
One of the things that was fun was the number of images he had taken that I have also taken.
One of the other things was that he had taken genres of images that I have also taken.
An example is “images of window displays”.
And just as is the case with images from the Twenty First Century, if one looks closely at Eugene’s images from the Nineteenth Century, one can see the photographer.
That is sort of spooky – like making new dinosaurs out of blood extracted from a mosquito preserved in amber.
Anyway, here is an example of the modern day phenomenon.
I took this in Bordeaux, not Paris, but it works just the same.
Here is the Twenty First Century Version:
But to make it an homage, here it is in grayscale:
Unlike Monsieur Atget, who had to lug around huge and heavy cameras and equipment, I had a little almost weightless digital camera.
And I have absolutely no idea what I am doing when I use a camera.
No comments:
Post a Comment