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BIOGRAPHIES
ATGET, EUGENE
France, 1857-1927
In the first three decades of the twentieth
century, Eugène Atget (1857-1927) tirelessly and sensitively
photographed the city of Paris and its environs.
Though Atget considered himself a photographic illustrator
of Paris and not an artist, and refused to allow himself to
be judged by fashionable contemporary artistic mores or use
his socially accepted status as "artisan," he inadvertently
established himself as one of the 20th century’s greatest
photographers. It is the intuitive visual quality of his work
that has continued to attract the attention and admiration
of later photographers who—as the exhibition demonstrates—have
shared ideas of the "ready-made," common aesthetic
approaches, related subject matter, and the use of serial
photography. |
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While Atget could be considered a surrealist, a cubist, and a conceptualist,
his images pretend to be nothing other than what they really are.
No other photographic works convey with such silent authority the
message that all photography is "ready made" and accessible.
It is precisely their sense of impassivity, in which the image reveals
its true nature to us, which touches us most: the poetry of space
is communicated through the juxtaposition of proportions and the simple
centering of the image.
Eugène Atget was born in Libourne, France in 1857. He spent
his early years working at a variety of professions, from sailor to
actor, the latter being a vocation he took seriously but in which
he never achieved great success. By the mid-1880’s, Atget took
up photography as a way to earn a living. His early work consisted
mainly of photographs made for use as artists’ models. While
Atget received no formal artistic schooling, this practice of photographing
subjects on demand for clients was valuable training for his eye.
By 1897, Atget began a systematic visual catalogue of Paris, photographing
the city’s streets, buildings, shopfronts, parks and people
prodigiously over a twenty-year period. To increase his knowledge
about his subject, he became an amateur urban and architectural historian.
Following the tradition of earlier French photographers like Charles
Marville and Henri Le Secq, Atget used his camera to create images
that preserved the city’s historical past. Yet these photographs
were not just documentation, for Atget’s visual acumen is evident
in many of the striking compositions that are characteristic of his
work.
Atget’s documentation project was done of his own enterprise,
rather than on contract or commission. Although he quickly acquired
a diverse audience for his prints, his commercial independence allowed
him visual freedom. Atget sold the majority of his work between 1898
and 1914. Although he maintained an exclusive list of private clients,
the bulk of his photographs were purchased by such public institutions
as the Bibliothèque Nationale, the Musée Carnavalet,
the École des Beaux-Arts, and the Bibliothèque Historique
de la Ville de Paris. During this period, it is believed that Atget
created over 10,000 negatives.
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