Parc Monceau, Atget and me
January 8th, 2012 by HvdE
The Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam hosted a big Eugene Atget exhibition, which I visited on the last day it showed here, before it ships to Paris. That is of course the city that inspired Atget to make an enormous amount of photos. He avoided the new Paris, with its grand avenues, and focussed on the Paris he saw disappearing rapidly.
But some things have survived over the course of the 20th century and into ours. Like this plane tree he photographed in Parc Monceau in 1901:
This photo is not in the exhibition, it is in the collection of the George Eastman House. When I saw this in their photostream on flickr, I immediately knew I had seen this tree earlier this year. I took my photo from the opposite side, where on Atget’s photo the path runs into a group of trees and shrubs. Needless to say the tree is enormous now, after 110 years of additional growth.
Enjoy the combination of then and now, with the link above, and the following photos taken in September 2011:
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