A photograph can have the power to translate an experience into visual representation; a morning street becomes a tranquil, dreamy room of playful shadows, a boarded shop into a delicately carved wall of stone that house the unseen forces of Paris; the wispy residue of a soul in the corner yet to be noticed by the livelihood of the glowing sunlight. Yet when does the photograph no longer remain part of the photographer, instead the viewers.
The weight of the photographs taken in Paris by Eugène Atget has more value than its content, more value than its interpretations, and go beyond the vision Atget had as they were taken. Atget was a man dedicated to his passion of photography and unnerved by other influences beyond him and his subject. Subjectivity was the true medium, and the experiences of only value. An Amiable and modest photographer, who showed me that Subjectivity was the true medium, and the experiences of only value.
La cour du Dragon (Paris VIe) par Eugène Atget (1913).
A Modest Photographer
Jean-Eugène-Auguste Atget (b. 1857) wandered the streets of Paris at dawn before they filled with people in an attempt to capture the character of a quickly diminishing old Paris. His photographs provide a seedy undertone of a moment in time that consists of all the past histories of a location, and he reveals this with the snap of a shutter. Undeniably loyal to his work and “rigorous to the point of obsession”[1], he did not stray far from his preferred method, yet created mysterious portraits of a city that varied as much as the inhabitants that slept behind those closed shutters and doors.
He did not create images for himself, to challenge standards of art, or to profit and become well-known…and by doing so reinvented the value of a photographer and his fascination with his surroundings to a level of enlightenment where only the work matters.
Historically, it is not highlighted how Atget influenced following artists and photographers, due to a subtler impression he left on how subsequent photography-making is treated. His catalog of stunning documentation of Paris is a great collection of history, but is merely a product of a man enraptured by his surroundings with the sole urge to create from it. He was not fazed by how many prints he sold and was modest on matters of receiving credit for his work.
Abbot and the Surrealists
Atget had little to do with his own celebrity, and was unknown as a photographer until the later 1920’s after being associated with Man Ray, who was staying in Paris and associated with the group of Surrealists during the 1920’s. At the time he was an aging man creating salt prints of Paris landscapes to provide to other artists. A man of many careers, he was acknowledged as an actor and painter among other things, but Man Ray described him as “a simple man, almost naïve.”[2] Man Ray was interested in Atget and his photographs, his oeuvre and aesthetic complimentary to the new flourish of Avant-garde artistry that was only recently had encompassed photography.
The photographs had an impact on Ray and his compatriots and led to his inclusion in the surrealist journal, La Révolution Surréliste. Atget refused to receive credit in the publishing but his contribution became one of the major events in his photographic career.
Along the way a young aspiring sculptor and photographer, Berenice Abbott, was introduced to him. Abbott was young but extremely enthusiastic over Atget’s work, in fact she was the only person to photograph his portrait (aside from the reflections of himself transposed in some of his own works). In August 1927 Atget passed away and the remnants of his workshop became the only residue of the artist. His death was a catalyst in its own right, because only afterward could his work represent him instead of the other way around. His death led to the revival of an artist whose sole purpose was to document what he felt like photographing and creating his own mantra as to how an artist can live and create.
Berenice Abbott, who came to Paris from New York, had contacted a friend and Surrealist enthusiast Julien Levy, and together salvaged Atget's collection.
Paris Photographs
Describing Atget based on what he photographed is a difficult task, of course his main subject was the city and life of Paris, but the idiosyncratic locations were what often sparked his curiosity. He captured the “unforeseen meaningfulness of ordinary things” as Szarkowski underlines, in a way that only Atget could deliver, and this quality has enraptured many artists and photographers. Avenue des Gobelins, 1925 (figure 1) presents the storefront window with a motley crew of uncanny mannequins demonstrating the clothing sold inside.
Avenue des Gobelins, 1925
The figurines hold imitated personalities, stale and frozen, stuck in a multilayered surrounding that nearly reminds the viewer of a state of limbo that exists in aging cities. Shrapnel of limbs and faces from the mannequins peak and dive between reflections of bright sky and inhabitable shadows. The reflection caused by the window pane creates a background integrated into the foreground, a playground of old and new Paris. “With no conception of space, they exist solely in relation to time,”[3] Dyer describes Atget’s work as something else alongside reality.
What drove him to take these photographs was not a matter of principles, but of the interests of the artist. To the surrealists, Atget was more connected to his unconscious enabling him to produce such visually provoking imagery, as humble in their position as Atget was behind his large format camera.
Method
Atget held a common subject matter in a loose tradition; he was not heeded by what should be seen as art, instead following his own curiosity into the common and banal. This humble subject matter, where he preferred unnamed corridors to the majesties of monuments such as the Eiffel Tower explains the subtle tone that can emit from his work.[4] While he often excluded people from his photographs in stillness, they were the true matter of his landscapes. He could orchestrate a scene of livelihood in the quietest of streets.
Familiar are the means of his profession; using out-dated equipment and exposing on 18x24cm glass plates Atget would drift among the pathways of Paris in the early rays of the morning[5]. Creating contact prints, he was no soldier to modern technique and was satisfied in his own methodology. His technique and equipment would come to identify him, but the true idiosyncrasy was in his mannerism of photographing, not equipment.
Place Dancourt, Théâtre de Montmartre, 1925
His style was slightly unorthodox in the unbiased choices he made, where lighting played more of a role in subject matter than what was captured. In Place Dancourt, Théâtre de Montmartre, 1925 (fig. 2), morning light flutters through the leaves of a small courtyard of trees, where the branches almost drown in a glowing sea of skylight energy; patterns displayed on the pavement below from the leaves. In the center Théâtre de Montmartre seems a shadow of an older Paris guarded by an apotropaic wooden cart. A suited figure, head blurred into anonymity, rests on a bench as the only physical presence. Yet the image couldn’t be livelier, a portrait of a building “in which people are everywhere suggested by their absence.”[6]
The prints he produced, so elegantly presenting the mundane in an atmosphere that reflects time and space, are nonetheless a result of Atget’s individual. Atget is celebrated more for what Ferdinand Rayher presented as an “original sensibility”[7] that did more than inspire, but encourage discourse.
His idiosyncratic routine unobstructed by critical eyes, lacking “manifesto-fueled strategies”[8] or declaration of what content is proper in art led to a reidentification of what can be expected of an artist. An artist drawing from his experiences, honest to himself, this is why Atget had a lasting effect.
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[1] Jean-Claude Lemagny and Agnes de Gouvion Saint-Cyr. 20th Century French Photography.(New York: Rizzoli, 1988), 25.
[2] Paul Hill and Thomas Cooper, Dialogue with Photography (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson Ltd, 1979),18.
[3] Dyer, Geoff, “Eugène Atget: Mute Witness, Aperture206. (2012): 66-73. Accessed March 22, 2014, http://web.a.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.lib.apsu.edu/ehost/detail?vid=3&sid=5ad15aaf-b103-4129-a3ce-9def6f9ca0d1%40sessionmgr4003&hid=4101&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZSZzY29wZT1zaXRl#db=aft&AN=72319492.
[4] Perez, Gilberto. “Atget's "Stillness",” The Hudson Review 36, no 2. (1983): 334, accessed March 8, 2014, http://www.jstor.org/stable/385208.
[5] Paul Hill and Thomas Cooper, Dialogue with Photography, 17.
[6] Dyer, Geoff, “Eugène Atget: Mute Witness, 68.
[7] John Szarkowski, The Work of Atget, 24.
[8] Dyer, Geoff, “Eugène Atget: Mute Witness, 70.