Atget’s Paris
Ed. Christian Adam
Taschen, Los Angeles
2001
192 pp., Numerous black &white illustrations., 5½x7¾"
Eugene Atget is our memory of Paris from the turn of the twentieth century. What greater acknowledgment could there be for a photographer than for creating a body of work that has come to definitively represent how we know a particular place and time? Atget’s images exist outside of our normative ideas of art, history, and photography yet exemplify the greatest achievements anyone could make in those areas. We have known and never will know much about this humble keeper of Parisian life, and that adds all the more to the legacy a huge body of work found in Atget’s thousands of photographs of early twentieth century Paris, a selection of which is found in this slender volume.
A tall, soft-spoken man who made photographs for sale to artists and civic institutions, Atget arose early each day to photograph architectural details, storefronts, and workers – well before the streets became to bustling with the business of each day and those curiosity-seekers who might interfere with the work of photographing. He carried a large view camera, utilizing plate glass negatives as his recording device, and continued to work in this manner long after acetate film had come to replace the easily-damaged glass substrate. The load weighed approximately 20 kilograms, making it no small feat in traversing cobblestone steps and stairs of an expanding metropolis. The rooms he occupied with his companion and assistant, Valentine Compagnon, were simple and the work area he used for his photography was equally spare. Atget photographed for a few years at the tail end of the 19th century and then for years to come until his death in 1927.
He did not participate in the flourishing cultural scene of painters, writers, and musicians, but existed in his own world of creating a document of Paris before the notion of his Paris became too new a thing of the 20th century. The roads were widening and the haste of modernity was bringing a speed to bare on Paris that would leave it unrecognizable for a man whose job it became to record the everyday shapes of walls filled with lush, hand-drawn posters, the carousels of yore, or the stonework found in the detail of an ancient structure. Picture after picture shows storefronts, their proprietors, and the wares they sell. In his most famous image Magasin de vetementes pour hommes or Menswear Shop, three male mannequins gaze in different directions as their gesturing hands hover above a row of sized pants. They appear to look to an outer world, smiling yet still bound by their Pinocchio-like lifelessness, approaching reality only through the reflection of distant trees illuminated by bright sun. In another image, Maison d'un chiffonnier or Rag-and-bone man's house, the front of a clapboard shelter is adorned with a motley collection of cherubs, animal figurines, and even a few actual stuffed animals all wrapped together in the vertical embrace of ivy from a makeshift window box barely standing on its two legs. At the corner of a house, a solitary black shoe sits on the bare soil.
Perhaps we, as Americans can barely begin to appreciate the idea of the continuous influence of history as it is known in Europe outside of a littering of references to the 18th century on our East coast. Atget knew more than he showed and displayed his knowledge not by romanticizing what was or by recording out of prescience for a disappeared world, but out of appreciation for the world as it is now. Maybe holding on to the world could be done without reflex or pretense more easily then than now. Atget’s nominal job was in supplying historical institutions with images of the city but photography was also his avocation. While workmanlike in their quantity, consistency, and comprehension, they are also subtly affectionate for both place and medium. By the time Atget went to work, the industrial revolution was already at full-tilt but Atget was just young enough to know an earlier world, one without the haste for dissatisfaction that has now come to define our lives. He made the most of this knowledge of change.
Atget's Paris is part of Taschen’s ICONS series of slim, paperbacks often found in large stacks at half-price books for a few dollars. Unable to afford the more lovely Atget productions like John Szarkowski’s Atget from 1998, this book seemed like a simple way of adding Atget’s work to the my library and his inspiration to my own consideration of the changing face of King County (including Seattle) here in the 21st century. The images lack the crème tonality of the original albumen prints found in other color reproductions of the work and, despite being cropped to a full bleed, the viewer can still appreciate the work greatly as I did, slowly turning the pages in a quiet room to take in the clear mysteriousness of each picture. A time and place, all past, containing wondrous, typically vertical, pictures of alleys receding into alleys, ghoulish concrete creatures leering at us, vendors hawking their wares, and the occasional prostitute beckoning us through the camera’s eye. All are past yet unlike other documentarians of place such as Timothy O’Sullivan or John Thomson, the place feels present in every sense of the word.
Owing to the size of his oeuvre and ability to perceive the significant nuance in a multitude of subject, Atget’s work stands apart for approaching a place from near-to-far, rich-to-poor, and reflectively for the inside-out-ness of things be they interiors or exteriors, most exemplified by glass storefronts or interiors decorated with larger mirrors. Atget was consistently able to see a place for the subject itself and what it could be as projected through photographic space in 2D form. Projected as well in secondary form through time as we enter the artist’s mind, walking and thinking through a dream of a Paris long disappeared. Whether in a newspaper kiosk, a cart for hauling water, or the statuary at Versaille, I feel compelled to step inside to better understand the subjects' reason for being.
It is amazing how so modest a man could be so bold in his efforts. Daring whether it be in the striking verticality of a picture like Former choir school, Ancienne maison de la maitrise, emphasizing Atget’s use of wide-angle lens or in choosing subject matter unique as in Loueuse de bateaux modeles reduits, a woman renting model boats to pleasure-seekers.
Technicallly the images often have imperfections, even given the more limiting photographic processes that Atget chose, but they are of no matter. The blown-out sky or fuzzy subject only add to the aura of lost Paris. I like to imagine Atget’s primary camera on view as an object of reverence within a protective vitrine, containing all the marks of its use, much as in how Garry Winogrand’s Leica camera looks like how he used it, that these machines show time spent photographing much as the pictures show time captured. Cameras like theirs represent the photographer as worker, devices to be honored for their survivability against users who would exploit them to no end but incessant picture-making.
He was made popularly known through the dedication of Bernice Abbott and the fawning attention of our most famous Surrealist photographer, Man Ray who claimed him as a modern primitive. Without addressing their efforts, I would like to think that we would still know him today, as the work needs no mediation or academic explanation. The few facts we know of Atget's life are perfectly adequate, giving just enough information to leave us wanting, and never getting in the way of the photographs themselves. Atget, and his notion of Paris, needs no further voice than what can be seen in these perfect, timeless pictures.
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