This is one of my own photographs from my time in Paris that I've altered quite a bit, trying to get it to look something like the photographs by Eugene Atget that I saw at an exhibit at the Musée Carnavalet. Its close, but not perfect. The Atgets were remarkable for the sense they gave of the historicity of the city - of its past as both distant and somehow present at the same time. Of the city, then, as somehow haunted by its past. Many of the sights he photographed no longer exist after a century or more of urban renewal projects. And yet the Marais - the area right around the Carnavalet - escaped most of that and so looks more like Atget's Paris than much of the rest of the city. So you can walk out of that museum and still see something like what you saw in his photographs inside. The photographs were intended to document the old city even as it disappeared and so to capture it for the future. But they are now visibly old too, sep...