Frank Horvat Italian, 28/04/1928–21/10/2020

A blind wall in Paris, the tall gable end of an apartment block, and painted across the top of it, letter by fading letter, the word PARIS. Lower down the whitewash has swallowed most of a slogan; what survives is a fragment ending in RA and, below it, TOUJOURS, still legible, still insisting. A bare tree stands in front of the whole thing, its branches spread over the lettering like cracks in a plate. At the left edge, the iron balconies of the neighbouring façade climb out of frame.

Horvat was working as a reportage photographer in 1955, and this is reportage of a kind, except that the event it records took years to happen. Rain and sun did the work; the painter's confident capitals went first, the sentence dissolved, and the tree kept growing. The joke, if it is one, is that the city's name is the only word the wall can still say clearly, and the word for always is the one it is losing.

I like that he did not wait for leaves. In winter the branches are a drawing, and the drawing sits on top of the wall's own drawing, two systems of lines that were never meant to meet. Photographers of Paris tend to want the river, the bridges, a kiss. Horvat wanted a wall that had been talking to nobody for a decade, and he gave it the tree as an audience.