Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 1960

David Vestal made this photograph of Rio de Janeiro with silver gelatin, and it's a bit like an abstract painting, if you ask me. The way the buildings in the background fade and blur into the sky makes it feel like a wash of grey, like a wet-on-wet watercolor. The texture is interesting, isn't it? Up close, the graininess gives it a tactile quality, a sense of the physical process of developing the film. It reminds me that photography, like painting, is a process of layering and building up an image, but in this case with light and chemicals. Notice the way the light catches on the hood of the car in the foreground, making it almost sculptural. It reminds me a bit of Atget's photographs of Paris, in its quiet observation of the everyday, and the way it captures a particular mood and atmosphere. In both cases, the artists invite us to see the world in a new way, to find beauty in the mundane, and to recognize that art is not just about the subject matter, but also about the way we see and experience it.