Parc Monceau, Atget and me

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:


Parc Monceau (8e arr), originally uploaded by George Eastman House.

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 last year. I took my photo from the opposite side, from a group of trees and shrubs where on Atget’s photo the path runs into. Needless to say the tree is enormous now, after 110 years of additional growth.

(Edited @ May 6th, 2012, to delete the slideshow and place the actual photo in the post. And altered the text a bit to reflect changes.)

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