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Biography The life and the intention of Eugene Atget are fundamentally unknown to us. A few documented facts and a handful of recollections and legends provide a scant outline of the man: He was born in Libourne, near Bordeaux, in 1857, and worked as a sailor during his youth; from the sea he turned to the stage, with no more than minor success; at forty he quit acting, and after a tentative experiment with painting Atget became a photographer, and began his true life's work. Until his death thirty years later he worked quietly at his calling. To a casual observer he might have seemed a typical commercial photographer of the day. He was not progressive, but worked patiently with techniques that were obsolescent when he adopted them, and very nearly anachronistic by the time of his death. He was little given to experiment in the conventional sense, and less to theorizing. He founded no movement and attracted no circle. He did however make photographs which for purity and intensity of vision have not been bettered. Atget's work is unique on two levels. He was the maker of a great visual catalogue of the fruits of French culture, as it survived in and near Paris in the first quarter of this century. He was in addition a photographer of such authority and originality that his work remains a bench mark against which much of the most sophisticated contemporary photography measures itself. Other photographers had been concerned with describing specific facts (documentation), or with exploiting their indivisual sensibilities (self-expression). Atgetenconpassed and transcended both approaches when he set himself the task of understanding and interpreting in visual terms a complex, ancient, and living tradition. The pictures that he made in the service of this concept are seductively and deceptively simple, wholly poised, reticent, dense with experience, mysterious, and true.
Photographic practice • Atget took up photography in the late 1880s, around the time that photography was experiencing unprecedented expansion in both commercial and amateur fields. He sold photos of landscapes, flowers, and other pleasantries to other artists. It wasn’t until 1897 that Atget started a project he would continue for the rest of his life—his Old Paris collection.. • Between 1897 and 1927 Atget captured the old Paris in his pictures. His photographs show the city in its various facets: narrow lanes and courtyards in the historic city center with its old buildings, of which some were soon to be demolished, magnificent palaces from the period before the French Revolution, bridges and quays on the banks of the Seine, and shops with their window displays. He photographed stairwells and architectural details on the facades and took pictures of the interiors of apartments. His interest also extend to the environs of Paris. • In addition to architecture and the urban environment, he also photographed street-hawkers, small tradesmen, rag collectors and prostitutes, as well as fairs and popular amusements in the various districts. The outlying districts and peripheral areas, in which the poor and homeless sought shelter, also furnished him with pictorial subjects.
Legacy • Atget created a tremendous photographic record of the look and feel of nineteenth-century Paris just as it was being dramatically transformed by modernization, and its buildings were being systematically demolished. • Atget had published almost no work before “his genius was first recognized” by two young American photographers working in Paris at the time. One of them reportedly asked him if the French appreciated his art, he responded, “No, only young foreigners”. His discovery by Ray and Abbott happened around 1925, just two years before his death, and Berenice Abbott first published most of his work in the United States only after his death. Abbott published Atget, Photographe de Paris in 1930, the first overview of his photographic oeuvre and the beginning of his international fame. • After Atget's death in 1927, his remaining archive was split. 2000 negatives were donated to a Paris institute, with the remainder bought by Berenice Abbott with financial support by Julien Levy. • In 1929, eleven of Atget's photographs were shown at the Film und Foto • Werkbund exhibition in Stuttgart. The U.S. Library of Congress has some 20 prints made by Abbott in 1956. • The Museum of Modern Art purchased the Abbott?Levy collection of Atget’s work in 1968. In 1985, MoMA completed publication of a four-volume series of books based on its four successive exhibition about atget’s life and work. • Atget, a Retrospective was presented at the BibliothequeNationale of Paris in 2007.
