Eugène Atget

Atget did not take up the camera until around 1897, when he was about forty. Having abandoned earlier ambitions as an actor and painter, he made his living selling what he called 'Documents pour artistes' — reference photographs of Paris for painters, decorators, and craftspeople. He worked with an old-fashioned large-format wooden bellows camera (18 x 24 cm) and glass negatives. From around 1888 until the First World War he continued to print on albumen paper, a process already considered obsolete, and he always printed by contact rather than enlargement. Because he gold-toned his prints, the images are not pure black and white but rich sepia to violet-brown in tone.

The roughly 10,000 photographs he made of early-morning Paris — streets, courtyards, shopfronts, brothels, and itinerant trades threatened by Haussmannization — are direct records stripped of decoration. Atget did not present his work as 'art photography.' When Man Ray tried to publish some of the images in the Surrealist journal La Revolution surrealiste in 1926, Atget is said to have replied: do not put my name on them; these are merely documents^*1. Yet the Surrealists were drawn to the emptiness, reflections, and deserted streets in his work. In 1931 Walter Benjamin argued that Atget had helped liberate photography from aura and had made visible a sense of estrangement before Surrealism itself^*2. The person who secured his legacy was Berenice Abbott, who had met him while assisting Man Ray, bought the archive after his death in 1927 with the help of Julien Levy, and brought it to New York. From the 1930s onward she presented him through exhibitions and publications as a precursor of modern documentary photography^*3. When MoMA acquired the archive in 1968, John Szarkowski and Maria Morris Hambourg spent years reconstructing Atget's own categories and making a major body of research and exhibitions possible. Their argument was that even though Atget began from 'documents,' he developed an unmistakable visual language through tonal subtlety, texture, and a fractured sense of time^*4.