Back To The Past: Atget Encore - photographer Eugene Atget

Afterimage, May, 2001 by Stephen Longmire

Eugene Atget: Itineraires parisiens/A Portrait of Paris: Eugene Atget at Work

Musee Garnavalet-Histoire de Paris

Paris, France

October 14, 1999-January 16, 2000

The Museum of the City of New York

New York, New York

November 4, 2000-February 4, 2001

Eugene Atget, le pionnier/Eugene Atget, the Pioneer

Hotel de Sully

Paris, France

June 23-September 17, 2000

International Center of Photography

New York, New York

October 7, 2000-January 21, 2001

Eugene Atget: Itineraires parisiens

by David Harris

Paris: Musee Carnavalet (editions du patrimoine), 1999

200 pp./$39.95 (sb)

Atget the Pioneer

by Jean-Claude Lemagny, with Sylvie Aubenas, Pierre

Borhan & Luce Lebart

Munich, London, New York: Prestel, 2000

200 pp./$65.00 (hb)

Paris: Eugene Atget 1857-1927

edited by Hans Christian Adam, with an essay by Andreas Krase

Cologne: Taschen, 2000

252 pp./$39.99 (hb)

Atget

by John Szarkowski

New York Museum of Modern Art/Callaway, 2000

224 pp./$60.00 (hb)

In Focus: Eugene Atget, Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum

by Gordon Baldwin, with a conversation between Gordon Baldwin, David Featherstone, Robbert Flick, David Harris, Weston Naef, Francoise Reynaud & Michael S. Roth

Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Trust, 2000

144 pp./$17.50 (sb)

"Is not photography the only art able to throw up masterpieces by accident?"

Jean-Claude Lemagny [1]

"Was he French or American?"

Justav Stotz [2]

It has been 20 years, amazingly enough, since New York City's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) launched its landmark cycle of exhibitions of the work of French photographer Eugene Atget (1857-1927), who spent his last 30 years documenting the architectural record of Paris and its surroundings at the beginning of the last century. Together, the four installments of "The Work of Atget," and the plush four-volume catalog of the same title that appeared between 1981 and 1985, were called the largest exhibition ever dedicated to a photographer. Who knows how such determinations are made, but I doubt this one has been surpassed--though the recent spate of Atget exhibitions and publications listed above would have given MoMA a run for its money, had they been a united effort. (If catalog weight alone were a deciding factor, there would be no question MoMA's slender volumes, which until recently remained the standard work on the photographer, in English or any other language, had been outdone.) That the current Atget revi val represents no single view of the elusive photographer, but a handful of revisionist ones alongside some traditionalist retrenching, is indicative of the dramatic shift in Atget studies since 1985, away from magisterial monographs toward more guarded, typically more historically and politically minded readings of the photographer's vast archive. Just who was Atget, and what did he think he was doing? These questions continue to determine where one stands on many of the pivotal issues in the history of photography, and its place in today's museums.

The Work of Atget was the work of John Szarkowski, now retired Director of MoMA's Photography Department, and his then assistant Maria Morris Hambourg (who since created and now heads the Department of Photographs at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art). Szarkowski is undeniably right to insist, as he does in his recent return to the subject, Atget,

The single most important contribution to Atget scholarship is surely that made by Maria Hambourg, when she established, in the early nineteen eighties, that Atget had divided his work into thirteen categories, or series, some small and some large, and when she identified the numerical sequences by which these categories were identified in Atget's file. From these data she was able to produce a chart that enabled the rest of us, for the first time, to date Atget's pictures with reasonable certainty.

At the same time, she estimated Atget's total production--the pictures that he saved--at about 8,500 pictures. [3]

In 1968 MoMA acquired some 5000 Atget prints and some 1300 negatives from American photographer Berenice Abbott, who purchased the remains of the older photographer's studio from his estate. This makes MoMA's Atget collection by far the most substantial on this side of the Atlantic. Significant collections of Atget prints and negatives exist in the archives of several Paris libraries and museums that bought from him during his lifetime (notably the Bibliotheque Nationale, the Bibliotheque Historique de la Ville de Paris, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, the Musee de la Ville de Paris [Musee Carnavalet] and the Service Photographique des Monuments Historiques), but until quite recently these institutions were not in the habit of regarding such historical materials as art. The American obsession with Atget started that.

No one debates that Atget began his photographic career (in 1887, though he would not begin photographing Paris for another 10 years) as a stock photographer. He advertised "documents for artists" ("documents pour artistes"), but evidently made the bulk of his living from sales to institutions, particularly those that catered to the tastes of architectural connoisseurs who lamented the demise of Old Paris (le Vieux Paris), or remnants of the city dating back to before the Revolution of 1789. Paris was substantially rebuilt in the 1850s and '60s by Napolean III's Prefect Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann, who carved up old neighborhoods to lay wide boulevards effectively leveling the largest medieval city in Europe to create a modern imperial capitol in its place. It was an "urban renewal" program of which latter-day bulldozer builders like Robert Moses (who made New York City fit for highways a century later) would have been proud, but the movement had its detractors, off whom Atget continued to make his living at least until 1920. That year Atget sold over 2600 of his 18 x 24 cm glass negatives--containing, he boasted, "all of Old Paris" [4]--to the Monuments Historiques, for the substantial sum of 10,000 francs. He was, arguably, free of his project, and of the care of his negatives, which he had barely preserved through the bombardments of the First World War, during which he ceased photographing. But Atget kept working, making many of the pictures for which he is now remembered during the remaining seven years of his life.