Eugène Atget (Masters of Photography) - Hardcover

Atget, Eugène

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0893817503 ISBN 13: 9780893817503

Publisher: Aperture, 2004

Synopsis

Eugène Atget photographed the city of Paris and its environs obsessively for almost thirty years. He discovered a market for documentary photographs of Old Paris, which were bought by artists as source material for their canvases. But for Atget, the production of photographs about old French culture was also an occasion for making art.

His photographs are unparalleled in their lucid realism and their lyrical response to the living pulse of the city and to artifacts that speak of human life in almost every social class. His images of parks, lakes, shop windows, vendors, prostitutes, buildings, sculpture, street scenes of Paris, go beyond mere documentation to a poetic vision of a time gone by. Atget created some of the most beautifully articulated images of light and space ever made with a camera-- an imaginary world.

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Review:

In this day and age we have pretty much taken photography for granted as an integral part of everyday life. There is the immediacy of Polaroids and the limitlessness of disposable cameras, which makes a picture taken today a distant cousin to the practice of early photography. Occasionally we need reminding of the roots of photographic image making: the glass plates, hand-coated emulsion and massive amounts of other accoutrements that were needed to make one image. In Atget, a selection from the lifetime work of legendary French photographer Eugene Atget (1857-1927), we enter the world of early 20th-century photography, which was beginning to bid farewell to the hand-crafted picture.

Atget was poised on the cusp between the techniques and materials of early photography and the moment things began to change and modern photography was born. From a laborious and time-consuming process came a much faster method that changed the nature of photography forever. Seemingly overnight the photograph went from something precious to something on its way to being accessible to all. Atget was among the first generation to photographically capture the world of ordinary citizens. While the subject matter was new, Atget was nevertheless steeped in the tradition of the old-world photograph. A crooked doorknocker is captured with loving attention to detail, an air of preciousness still present. Spindly trees, store windows, public gardens... each picture is delicate and romantic. It makes you wonder if absolutely everything was more beautiful in France. Included are insightful commentaries for each of the 100 tritone photographs and five duotones, plus a really great introduction by John Szarkowski, former Director of the Department of Photography at the MOMA. --J.P. Cohen

About the Author:

Born in 1857 in Bordeaux, Eugène Atget was the son of a carriage maker, but was soon orphaned and went to live with an uncle. He studied at the Conservatory of the French National Theatre in Paris, and after a number of years working as an actor, he turned to photography at the age of forty-two. He rapidly became absorbed in a documentary project which, over the last thirty years of his life, resulted in more than ten thousand glass-plate negatives of turn-of-the-century Paris and its rural environs. Atget's photographs are now considered early masterpieces of photographic realism. He died in 1927 at the age of seventy in Paris.

About this edition

• Publisher: Aperture
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0893817503
• ISBN 13: 9780893817503
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 96