EUGÈNE ATGET (February 12, 1857 – August 4, 1927) was a French photographer noted for his photographs documenting the architecture and street scenes of Paris. Atget, among the first of photography’s social documenters, has come to be regarded as one of the medium’s major figures. His images of Paris are perhaps the most vivid record of a city ever made.
Saint-Cloud. Corner of the park.
Atget took no portraits per se, but he did photograph street characters: peddlers, garbage collectors, road workers, and so on. His friend Andre Calmette wrote that Atget set out to photograph “everything in Paris and its environs that was artistic and picturesque.” His ambition is more professional than artistic. A sign on its door mentions ” Documents for artists ” and an advertisement appeared in La Revue des Beaux-Arts, in 1892, confines well its work ” Landscapes, animals, flowers, monuments, documents, foregrounds for artists, reproduction of paintings, movements. Collection not being in the business. “
Staircase. Hôtel de Jean de Fourcy, 30 rue des Francs-Bourgeois.
Atget photographs an evanescent world dedicated to an imminent disappearance, a Paris in the grip of the transformations of the town planning. While the concrete, the glass, the electricity remodel districts and streets, Atget, with entomologist’s application, lists alleys, mansions, ancient shops and these no-man’s-land between the capital and the first villages. Atget made methodical surveys of the old quarters of the city. He was to make over 10,000 photographs of this immense subject in the next 30 years using obsolete equipment: an 18 X 24 cm bellows camera, rectilinear lenses, a wooden tripod, and a few plate holders.
Embassy of Austria, 57 rue de Varenne (current Hôtel Matignon).
The quiet, even understated, appreciation of a subject’s beauty in Atget’s work has led many to consider him naive, a primitive. In truth, his work is marked by a purity of vision, a refusal of painterly rhetoric, and a deceptive simplicity. One of Atget’s earliest admirers was the young Ansel Adams, who wrote in 1931: “The charm of Atget lies not in the mastery of the plates and papers of his time, nor in the quaintness of costume, architecture and humanity as revealed in his pictures, but in his equitable and intimate point of view. . . . His work is a simple revelation of the simplest aspects of his environment. There is no superimposed symbolic motive, no tortured application of design, no intellectual ax to grind. The Atget prints are direct and emotionally clean records of a rare and subtle perception, and represent perhaps the earliest expression of true photographic art.”
Court, 178 avenue de Choisy.
In 1926 Atget’s neighbor Man Ray published (without credit) a few of Atget’s photographs in the magazine La revolution surrealíste. This marked the beginning of the important surrealist appreciation of his work. Berenice Abbott, a student of Man Ray’s, was impressed by Atget’s photographs in 1925, and has been responsible for rescuing his work from obscurity and preserving his prints and negatives, which she acquired upon his death in 1927. She has written: “He will be remembered as an urbanist historian, a genuine romanticist, a lover of Paris, a Balzac of the camera, from whose work we can weave a large tapestry of French civilization.”
Fountain Childebert, 1720 (detail), public garden Monge.
“Atget était un comédien qui, rebuté par son métier, effaça son masque, puis se mit en devoir de démaquiller aussi le réel. [...] Atget a atteint le pôle de la suprême maîtrise ; mais avec la modestie opiniâtre d’un grand expert qui vit toujours dans l’ombre, il négligea d’y planter son drapeau. Ainsi beaucoup peuvent s’imaginer avoir découvert le pôle où avant eux il a mis le pied”. En effet : les photographies parisiennes d’Atget sont les précurseurs de la photographie surréaliste ; l’avant-garde de la seule colonne véritablement importante que le surréalisme ait réussi à mettre en branle. Le premier, il désinfecte l’atmosphère suffocante qu’avait répandue le portrait photographique conventionnel de l’époque de la décadence. Il purifie, mieux : il dissipe cette atmosphère. Il inaugure cette libération de l’objet par rapport à l’aura, qui est le mérité le moins contestable de la nouvelle école photographique.”
Extrait de Démaquiller le réel de Walter Benjamin
“Petite histoire de la photographie”, Literarische Welt in Œuvres II, Gallimard Folio essais, 2000.
Homeless, boulevard Port-Royal.
Text collaged from various sources.
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