Eugène Atget. Select Works

Associated media

James Hyman Photography 5 Savile Row   London W1S 3PD

12 October–12 November 2011 

This is a chance to see a select group of vintage photographs by Eugène Atget (1857 – 1927). The exhibition coincides with Anna Fox. RESORT. and Lynne Cohen. There’s Always Something.

In many ways Atget was the first conceptual artist in his approach to the modern metropolis.  Atget's apparently prosaic photographs often present a dream-like ambiance and possess a strange stillness in what was otherwise a bustling urban centre. Atget often catalogued these spaces thematically and formed a valuable visual encyclopedia of the time. This archive presents a stock record of a disappearing Paris, which now exists in collections around the globe.

Today, Atget is recognized less for the document itself than for his unique perspectives, which some mark as the first ‘modern’ points of view presented through the lens. This classification of subjects, such as staircases, also anticipates the typographies of Bernd and Hilla Becher. Critic Walter Benjamin described how Atget’s photographs operated outside their ‘documentary’ purpose. These works avoid the ‘perfection’ of academic photography. They use vignetting and tangential perspectives to reposition their subjects while still retaining fidelity to detail.

The photographs presented in this exhibition are all vintage and are available for the first time in London as part of James Hyman Photography’s commitment to the presentation of the highest quality vintage artworks in the UK. Atget has most recently had solo exhibitions at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris (2007), the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2007), the International Center for Photography, New York (2010) and was recently shown for first time in Spain at the Fundación Mapfre this summer.

Recent publications include Eugene Atget: Paris 1989-1924 (TF Editores, 2011) and Atget: Photographe de Paris (Books on Books) (Errata Editions, 2009) by David Campany, Jeffrey Ladd and Pierre Mac Orlan. Please contact the galley for a list of available works.