“Among all the objects Brassai has photographed his chair with the wire legs stand out with a majesty that is singular and disquieting. It is a chair of the lowest denomination, a chair which has been sat on by beggars and royalty, by little trot-about whores and by queenly opera divas. It is a chair the municipality rents daily to any and every one who wishes to pay fifty centimes for sitting down in the open air.
The most unostentatious, the most inexpensive, the most ridiculous chair, if a chair can be ridiculous, which could be devised. Brassai chose precisely this insignificant chair and snapping it where he found it, unearthed what there was in it of dignity and veracity. THIS IS A CHAIR. Nothing more. No sentimentalism about the lunatics who fabricated it, no statistics about the hours of sweat and anguish that went into the creation of it, no sarcasm about the era which produced it. no odious comparison with chairs of other days, no humbug about the dreams of the idlers who monopolise it, no scorn for the nakedness of it, no gratitude either. Walking along the path of Jardin des Tuileries one day he saw this chair standing on the edge of a grating. He saw at once chair, grating, tree, the clouds, the sun, the people. He took it as it was, with its honest little holes, its slender wire legs.
On such a fine spring day, there is visible on the stalest object a promise, a hope, a possibility. Nothing is dead, except in the imagination.
Animate or inanimate, all bodies under the sun give expression to their vitality.
And so on that day, in that glorious hour, the homely, inexpensive chair belonging to the municipality of Paris, became the empty throne, which is always beseeching the restless spirit of man to end his fear and longing and proclaim the kingdom of man.”
Henry Miller, The Eye of Paris
