Eugène Atget's documentary Surrealism

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Eugène Atget: Old Paris

Fundació Mapfre & TF Editores

Long lauded by the Surrealists, in November 1920 Eugène Atget wrote to the Minister of Beaux-Arts, Paul Léon ‘I possess the whole of Old Paris’. Yet Atget was neither an artist nor a precursor of the avant-garde. He sought only to earn his living, having no pretentions for himself or his photographs. The photographer Brassaï said of him: ‘Atget considered himself not as an artistic photographer, but as a documenter capable of providing artists and decorators working for the theatre or films with any view of the city, any  quartier,  any street’.

Besides artists, artisans and history enthusiasts, among his regular clientele were prestigious institutions and this volume comes from one of these. It shows a small part of the Musée Carnavalet’s vast holdings of his work. In addition, it contains Man Ray’s album of Atget’s photographs, held by George Eastman House, Rochester, NY, reproducing the photos, not merely illustrating them,  in a way that preserves every original nuance of their tones and colours.

Little is known of Atget the man. Born in 1857 in Libourne, he died in 1927 in Paris. He never fully trained as a photographer, turning to it only in 1888, having failed as an editor for a satirical magazine and as an actor, among other things. He took most of his photographs between March and October, often soon after sunrise when few people were around, working only ever with one camera, which took 18 x 24cm glass plates on which he was able to record every small architectural detail. 

Anne Cartier-Bresson and Marsha Sirven review recent technical research into Atget’s techniques, materials and methods showing that, like his subjects, Atget clung to the past. He used the printing-out process and albumen papers long after the photographic industry had moved on. They also discuss the challenges of conserving and restoring the Museum’s photographic archive, ensuring it will continue to inform and enchant in the future.

Guillaume le Gall traces the beginnings of Atget’s series, placing the work in historical context. Atget, he says, was anchored more in the 19thcentury than its successor, working like an historian, methodically going through Paris’ old streets, district by district, documenting them. As Charles Marville’s work testifies, this in itself was not original. Marville documented the changes Haussmannization brought about in the 1850s in the making of the modern city. What was original was Atget’s vigour in pursuing his project and his work’s completely innovative structure. Gall likens Atget’s concentration on and classification of objects (his prints), to the 18th-century work of the Compte de Caylas, whose concentration on the object established a basis for modern archaeology.

Atget defined his subjects strictly, classifying his prints, grouping and regrouping them in different categories: Landscape – Documents, Outskirts, Picturesque Paris, Art in Old Paris, and Topography of Old Paris (categories followed in this volume’s plate selection). Within these series were sub-series: ‘Landscape – Documents’ has subsections on trees, flowers and plants, besides images of parks designed by Le Notre. ‘L’art dans le vieux Paris’ covers churches, facades, porches, doors, door-knockers, staircases, courtyards, fountains and other decorative elements.

Atget photographed those parts of the city unaffected by Haussmann’s demolitions, and Geoff Dyer points out how easily one forgets that he was working at the same time as pioneering modernists such as Edward Weston and Paul Strand. ‘The pictures urge us and themselves back in time’. Thus the image of a car and motorbike in ‘Courtyard, 7 rue de Valence, 5th arrondissement, June 1922’ comes as a jolt.

It was Atget’s series ‘Picturesque Paris’, with its images of craftsmen, passers-by, tramps, rag and bone men, prostitutes and activities within the city, small shops, shop windows, brothels, market stalls and cabarets, that made him known to the Surrealists.

 Thomas Michael Gunther tells us that Atget’s photographs embodied the idea of Surrealist’s urban wanderings by which they gathered disconnected experiences that assumed a lyrical form of expressive meaning. Atget’s subjects were taken out of their normal context; they functioned as narratives from the unconscious, a form of ‘psychic automatism’, a notion beloved by the Surrealists.

Man Ray, a neighbour of Atget’s in the rue Campagne Première from 1921, bought his photographs in 1925/26, first publishing some of them in 1926 in the magazine La Révolution Surrealiste. In 1928, the year following Atget’s death, his work was presented in the Salon des Indépendants de la Photographie together with that of  ‘anti-conformist and revolutionary’ photographers such as Man Ray, Berenice Abbott, Paul Outerbridge, Germaine Krull and André Kertész.

In 1929, Abbott, Man Ray’s assistant, bought Atget’s archive and took it to America. The gallery owner, Julien Levy began touting Atget’s importance as an avant-garde figure when he became co-owner of the archive in 1931. So Atget’s reputation, and legends about him, grew.

But Atget will be best remembered for his innate abilities, which gave us his images of an empty Paris, an eerie, magic place that encourages us to reflect on time and the permanent evidence of its passing.

Eugène Atget: Old Paris is published by  Fundación Mapfre & TF Editores, Madrid & Alcobendas, Spain, 2011.