Eugene Atget

Eugene Atget photographed Paris for thirty years, sold the prints as reference material to painters and architects, and did not think of himself as an artist at all. He was orphaned young, went to sea, failed as an actor, and took up photography in his forties with a heavy plate camera and a wooden tripod he carried around the city on foot from before dawn. The sign on his door said documents for artists. He sold to painters wanting a doorway or a shopfront, to the Musee Carnavalet, to the Bibliotheque Nationale, at a few francs a print, and he produced something like eight thousand negatives of streets, courtyards, staircases, shop windows, brothels, ragpickers, trees and the parks at Saint-Cloud and Versailles. He worked in early morning light with long exposures, so his Paris is almost empty of people, and the city he recorded was being demolished around him by the continuation of Haussmann. What the Surrealists found in that emptiness was not what he had put there: Man Ray published four of his pictures in La Revolution surrealiste in 1926, and Atget asked that his name not appear, saying they were simply documents. Berenice Abbott, then Man Ray's assistant, sought him out, made the only known portrait of him weeks before he died in 1927, and afterwards bought his surviving archive - roughly fifteen hundred plates and eight thousand prints - and spent four decades printing and publishing it. He died almost unknown. He is now generally treated as the founder of documentary photography. The Museum of Modern Art bought the Abbott collection in 1968 and catalogued it over twenty years. His prints were albumen on paper, a process already obsolete when he used it. He photographed the same streets repeatedly across decades, which is why the demolition can be dated from his work.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history