Parc de Sceaux c. 1925

This photograph of Parc de Sceaux was created by Eugène Atget. It’s a black and white image, and it’s amazing how Atget coaxes so many tones out of what could be a simple scene. The composition has a kind of dreamy, almost mournful quality. Look at the way the fountain is captured, almost like a stage set for a play about memory. You can almost feel the dampness of the stone, the way the water must sound trickling into the pool below. The texture is everything here. The pitted stone wall behind the fountain reminds me of some of Cy Twombly’s painterly surfaces. And that’s the beauty of art, right? It’s not just about what you see, but what it makes you feel, what it makes you think about. Atget’s photos do that for me. They remind me that art is a conversation, a dialogue across time and space. And sometimes, the simplest scenes can be the most profound.