The poetry of aerosol and the ghosts of Atget

houstonrockets, originally uploaded by c0rnporn.

This is pretty much the best picture I've seen in a long, long time.

You know how all these photographers travel to Paris to stick their tripods in the exact spot as Atget to recreate his magic, or maybe just to take notes on a city's change? Well, eventually they'll GPS our cameras, and then, well, then our generation or perhaps the one which follows us will have some Egglestons and Winogrands and yes, Atgets, and then being their ghost a hundred or a thousand years later will mean something completely different; they'll stand in the exact spot you or I or one of the famous ones did, breathe deeply hoping to conjure your ghost, your luck, your magic.
I personally don't have much nostalgia for this sort of thing, and I don't suppose I'll ever want to stand right where this picture was taken, but I would want to say to the photographer: "You've done it! You captured the inner woo-hoo, the elusive one, the childish gratitude inside of every photographer that feels exactly like blasting off into outer space powered by Aqua Net. That's quite a feat, actually, and can't be discounted. You've done it all with two cans, a man and a flash. Congrats."