I love being back in the loop..I mean country living has its fine points but today I find myself back in Sydney enjoying the visual, auditory and olfactory treats that only the city can provide... Guess I must be a stimulation junkie!But its the galleries of art and theatres of human performance that I miss most when I am sequestered in the country... So today I made an effort to go and see some original and not so original photography...The Art Gallery of New South Wales and the City of Sydney's 'Art and About' Festival is currently hosting an exhibition by one of the great fathers of street photography... Eugene Atget.... And viewing him as a French man working at the turn of the twentieth century it was for me the strangest exhibition... I could not help but think that most of his photographs had been taken yesterday...Instead of some sort of reverential emotion coursing through my veins at the sight of his work I felt that his photographs resonated with the simplicity of todays... well....Instagrams!So if this was my response to one of the 'acknowledged' masters of photography, what is it then that stops a person in their tracks and prompts them to say 'well that is something special'? Atget's work is beautiful. Unsentimental. But also unremarkable in its universality. He simply photographed the things around him... things other people may not have seen at the time... but just the things he saw around him...His images are humble but composed with a masters eye...So why is his work special enough to warrant an exhibition in the New South Wales Art Gallery? I believe its because in every single photograph I saw in the Eugene Atget exhibition I saw a recent photograph that had been based on the visual language Atget invented... I saw many of my own compositions and I saw many of the millions of photographs I see uploaded to Facebook everyday...So to me Atget was the first of the iphone photographers...and there is nothing like being first!This years Art and About Festival in Sydney is a rare visual festival that would seem to venerate the ordinary photograph in todays society. While Atget's humble offerings are on display at the NSW Art Gallery a selection of current photography hangs in the main corridor of Hyde Park. 'Sydney Life' is a public exhibition that displays recent images from known and unknown contemporary Australian photographers.It was pleasing then to see that Atgets classic compositional devices had all been broken by contemporary Australian photographers and it is with relish that I am seeing the development of an Australian visual aesthetic when it comes to photography. So, if you like I, am in Sydney for the month of October then I would urge you to see both these exhibitions and I would love to hear what you think!Todays photograph features Ellen Disaster with a proof sheet of her latest work from America.