What brought me downtown was Atget: The Making of a Reputation, a collection of photographs that were reproduced in Man Ray’s journal La Révolution surréaliste in 1926, and a set that were gathered for publication by Berenice Abbott in 1930.
Man Ray lived a few doors down from Atget in the Montparnasse neighborhood of Paris; Abbott was Man Ray’s assistant at the time. Abbott took a special interest in the mysterious photographer, later writing, “his photographs moved me and held me as no others did.” She was almost solely responsible for the preservation and canonization of the great street photographer.
I have always been drawn to Atget’s work, a Paris that no longer exists. Its storefronts, monuments, and avenues, photographed in the early mornings and mostly devoid of people. My favorite feature is the silence, conveyed by morning light, empty streets and alleys, and the sense of a city asleep. Such a unique quality in city/street photography, one that is very difficult to replicate given the twenty-four-hour nature of many metropolises.
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| Various publications of Atget's work |
“Atget’s photographs are the supreme proof that photography is more than a machine, Except for the complex factors of stopping motion, Atget found no obstacle to making his photographs an extremely expressive comment on life. Not the camera, but Atget himself, dictated what would be set down in these now fading but still beautiful prints. The intensity of his purpose and vision was the powerful drive which compelled him to undergo long years of neglect and privation. At the same time he accepted the tremendous labor of his method, carrying the cumbersome view camera literally thousands of miles, weighed down by bulky glass plates. For him the camera was but an instrument for expressing his intense awareness of life.”
-- Berenice Abbott, “Eugene Atget,” The Complete Photographer, November 10, 1941
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| Eugene Atget photographed by Berenice Abbott, 1927 |
