Water Lilies

Water Lilies, a photograph by Eugène Atget, made around nineteen ten or earlier. It hangs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, in the Photographs galleries, and the label reads two thousand five point one hundred point five two one.

A word before you look. Photographs are fragile, more than paintings, and museums rest them often. If this one is not on the wall today, that is simply its turn to rest in the dark.

What you are looking at, plainly, is water lilies. Not a painting of them, a photograph, most likely in the grays and blacks of an old silver print, since color photography was not yet common when Atget worked.

Step close first. Look for the surface of the water itself, how light sits on it, where the print goes soft or dark. Then step back and take in the whole pond, the pattern the leaves make, whether the frame feels like a place or like a study of shapes.

Here is what most people do not know walking in. Atget spent most of his working life photographing the streets, shopfronts, and courtyards of old Paris, methodically, almost like an archivist with a camera. A garden of water lilies is a quieter subject for him, and seeing it here is a chance to notice the same patient eye he brought to a doorway or a staircase, now resting on leaves and water instead of stone.

One fact worth carrying with you. Atget himself was not famous in his own lifetime. It was only after his death that the photographer Berenice Abbott gathered and preserved his negatives, and that is largely why we can stand in front of a print like this one today.

So take your time with it. Let your eye travel from the closest leaf to the farthest edge of the pond, and notice where the light seems to come from. That slow looking is the same thing Atget spent his life doing.