Haven't posted one of these in a while.
One of my favorite photographers and one who is a particular inspiration to me in my picture-taking is Eugene Atget (1856-1924). I've never known a lot about the man, other than he was one of the first 'journalistic' photographers and that he lived in France. I've always loved the immediacy of his photographs, though, and the seemingly ephemeral, unremarkable moments in time that he captured with his camera. They appear to me both hauntingly beautiful and strangely familiar - like I understand what he saw and why he stopped to take each photograph.
Here is a little bio on him from the Getty Museum website:
Quote:
Eugène Atget never called himself a photographer; instead he preferred "author-producer." A private, almost reclusive man, Atget first tried his hand at painting and acting, then began to photograph vieux Paris (Old Paris) in 1898. He photographed in part to create "documents," as he called his photographs, of architecture and urban views, but he supported himself by selling these photographs to painters as studies. Atget carried a large-format view camera, an outdated, cumbersome outfit, through the streets and gardens of Paris, usually photographing around dawn; many of these areas--storefronts and public spaces in nineteenth-century Paris and Versailles--were demolished soon afterward to make way for rapid urbanization.
Though Atget was not well known during his lifetime, his visual record of a vanishing world has become an inspiration for twentieth-century photographers. American expatriate photographers Man Ray and Berenice Abbott rescued his work from obscurity just before his death. Abbott preserved his prints and negatives, and was the first person to publish and exhibit Atget's work outside of France. Many existing prints of Atget's images were, in fact, made by Abbott in the 1930s from his negatives.
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And from AtgetPhotography.com:
Quote:
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.
Untill 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). Atget enconpassed 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.
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Normally I would try to put these into chronological order, but Atget's vision was persistent enough that it really isn't necessary...
I put all the titles in small caps, because I am not familiar with the French language and don't want to screw anything up.
parc monceau, 1901-02
saules, 1919
femme de verries, 1922
entree des jardins, 1921
saint-cloud, 1924
saint-cloud, 1921
grand trianon, le temple de l'amour a travers les abres, 1923
verailles, cyparisse par flamen, 1902
fete du trone, 1924
boulvard de strasbourg, corsets, 1912
magasins du bon marche, 1926
boulevard saint-denis, 1926
versailles, femme et soldat, maison close, 1921
marchand de vin, 15 rue boyer, 1910
villa d'un chiffonnier, boulevard massena, 1910
remouleur, 1899
boulevard de bonne-nouvelle, 1926
le dome, boulevard montparnasse, 1925
cour de rouer, 1922
rue de ursins, 1923
avenue de segur, 1925
coin de la rue valette et pantheon, 1925
cour, 41 rue broca, 1912
au tambour, 63 quai de la tournelle, 1908
gargouille, cour de louvre, 1921
rue boutebrie, mars 1922
notre-dame, mars 1925
un coin du quai de la tournelle, 1910-11
notre-dame, 1920-21
un coin, rue de seine, 1924
pont-neuf, hiver, 1923
parc de st. cloud, 1906
shop, avenue de gobelins, 1925
rue du maure, 1923
ragpicker, 1899-1900
prostitute, paris, 1920
un coin du quai de la founelle, 5e arrondisement, 1910-11
cour, 28 rue bonaparte, 1910
joueur d’orgue (street musicians), 1899-1900