Eugene Atget Appreciation

koraks · Mar 13, 2025

I think your reasoning is confused in that it doesn't acknowledge causality, it doesn't signal the inherent contradictions in your argumentation and it keeps tautologically relying on dogmatic premises. It's a conceptual hodgepodge. Which is fine, but the one thing I'll always keep resisting is the final point of so-called weak vs. strong images, and the implied objective standard that underlies this distinction. It flies in the face of what you said yourself in the bit about innate preferences - which is only the internal inconsistency in your reasoning, not to mention the external inconsistency between your argument and the collective body of knowledge.

This feels a bit like arguing with someone who has decided that 1+1 = 3. We can argue until the cows come home, but we'll have to just agree to disagree.

nikos79 · Mar 13, 2025

koraks said:
I think your reasoning is confused in that it doesn't acknowledge causality, it doesn't signal the inherent contradictions in your argumentation and it keeps tautologically relying on dogmatic premises. It's a conceptual hodgepodge. Which is fine, but the one thing I'll always keep resisting is the final point of so-called weak vs. strong images, and the implied objective standard that underlies this distinction. It flies in the face of what you said yourself in the bit about innate preferences - which is only the internal inconsistency in your reasoning, not to mention the external inconsistency between your argument and the collective body of knowledge.

This feels a bit like arguing with someone who has decided that 1+1 = 3. We can argue until the cows come home, but we'll have to just agree to disagree.

To be honest, I’m not even sure what we’re arguing about anymore . It seems like Atget doesn’t resonate with you that much, which is totally fine. I’m just saying — don’t dismiss him completely. Leave a small possibility that, down the road, you might see his work differently and come to appreciate it in a new light.

By the way, may I ask which photographers you like or admire? I’m curious!

koraks · Mar 13, 2025

nikos79 said:
It seems like Atget doesn’t resonate with you that much

That's not the issue. The issue is that you seem to equate your personal appreciation of his work with some kind of underlying objective and universal truth about its aesthetic merits. In addition, you seem to take the latter as a basis for making claims about Atget's intentions which at best we can guess at, and at worst these claims are inconsistent with the published photographs as such.

nikos79 said:
may I ask which photographers you like or admire?

Are we talking about photographs or photographers? They are different things. One more issue you seem to confuse.

nikos79 · Mar 13, 2025

koraks said:
That's not the issue. The issue is that you seem to equate your personal appreciation of his work with some kind of underlying objective and universal truth about its aesthetic merits. In addition, you seem to take the latter as a basis for making claims about Atget's intentions which at best we can guess at, and at worst these claims are inconsistent with the published photographs as such.

Are we talking about photographs or photographers? They are different things. One more issue you seem to confuse.

This is a long discussion about objective truth in art — one we could probably continue for hours. Definitely talking about photographers, I’d say that anyone can take a really good photo once in their life, but that alone doesn’t make them a great photographer.

Alex Benjamin · Mar 13, 2025

Don_ih said:
Anyone know what camera he was using?

You can kind of see its reflection here. Can't tell what camera it is, but can tell he was more than 3 feet tall .

nikos79 · Mar 13, 2025

Also regarding Atget's intentions were clear in his last letter to the Director of Fine Arts and Historic Monuments, stating:

"For more than twenty years, through my own initiative and work, I have photographed, using 18×24 cm negatives, the artistic documents of the beautiful urban architecture of Old Paris, from the 16th to the 19th century. This immense artistic and archival collection is now complete. I can truly say that I possess all of Old Paris.

Now that I am approaching old age (nearly 70) and have no successor or heir, I am deeply concerned and troubled about the future of this beautiful collection of negatives. It could fall into hands that do not understand its significance and ultimately be lost, benefiting no one. I would be most grateful, sir, if you could take an interest in this collection."

Alex Benjamin · Mar 13, 2025

Don_ih said:
Anyone know what camera he was using?

Found some info: 18 x 24 cm camera. Glass plates used were 17 x 21 cm.

nikos79 · Mar 13, 2025

Has anyone seen the "Trees of Atget"? I think he has hundreds photos of them

Now someone tell me isn't this composition crazy? Forget all modern rules that says never place subject in the middle this works amazing here!

snusmumriken · Mar 13, 2025

Before we leave the stairs for the trees, may I comment that the stairs photo (#260) is one of the few Atget photographs I’ve seen where the strange result seems clearly intentional, rather than accidental to the documentation of an object. He could so easily have chosen a viewpoint that showed the stairs in relation to the Palace. But he moved to one side and seems to have placed his camera on the ground or close to it, making that illusion of a massive, pointless staircase heading for the sky.

Don_ih · Mar 13, 2025

Thanks, @Alex Benjamin - that camera likely has rear movements of some kind. And his tripod looks like it can go to eye level. You can see he has a dark cloth draped over it.

@snusmumriken -- that seems definitely correct. Or he forgot his tripod that day

bernard_L · Mar 13, 2025

koraks said:
Looking at his images, it seems to me Atget was mostly interested in what he photographed, and much less so in how he pictured it, including all manner of intricate compositional choices that are attributed to him.

Seems to me there are two (more?) sides in Atget's work.

Documentary, to record what was left of the old Paris after Haussmann before it would completely disappear;
Pictures he took during time off from "commercial" (if not commissioned) work, notably in the parks of Sceaux or Saint-Cloud.

One comes across books of Atget photos that document only the first kind of photos; after seeing only those one might categorize Atget as purely documentary (although...).
See, however the pictures below; the compositional choices are clear. See also post #283 by @nikos79 above (thank you, I remembered that image but was unable to find it again); the tree in the middle violates (consciously, I'm convinced) the elementary composition rules; one step beyond classical compositional choices.

Mike Lopez · Mar 13, 2025

koraks said:
This feels a bit like arguing with someone who has decided that 1+1 = 3. We can argue until the cows come home, but we'll have to just agree to disagree.

How very smug. Frankly, your arguments in this thread read as though they are coming from someone who simply dislikes art critics and historians in general. It seems clear that you personally don’t like Atget. But I don’t see a need to repeatedly claim or imply that those who do somehow see themselves as innately superior. I’m not getting that from what @nikos79 has written at all.

Many years ago I checked out Ray Metzker’s Landscapes book from the library. After looking through it, I thought that one of the quotes on the book’s jacket, claiming to find the images “irresistible,” was just so much prattle. Years later, after many more viewings, after studying more works by Metzker and by others, and undoubtedly after some internal personal changes (dare I say growth?), I, too, began to love many of the pictures in that book. And now I own almost every published book of Metzker’s work. Does that make me innately superior? Nope. Did I come to appreciate something I just couldn’t connect with as a younger person? Indeed I did. I believe that this is what @nikos79 is fundamentally saying late in their most recent posts.

Don_ih · Mar 13, 2025

nikos79 said:
isn't this composition crazy?

The tree photobombed his otherwise perfect composition of the still pool.

Or it grew while he was setting up the tripod.

Alex Benjamin · Mar 13, 2025

nikos79 said:
Now someone tell me isn't this composition crazy? Forget all modern rules that says never place subject in the middle this works amazing here!

bernard_L said:
the tree in the middle violates (consciously, I'm convinced) the elementary composition rules; one step beyond classical compositional choices.

I don't think this violates any rule whatsoever, other than those devised by academic photographers eons after Atget took his last photo.

At the time Atget was fully active, the main visual artform was still painting. Impressionism was no longer relevant, Van Gogh had been dead for a decade — Cézanne soon to follow —, Picasso was moving towards cubism and the Germans were full into expressionism. That's the artistic world Atget was part of, and, since he often worked for painters, hard to think he was not aware of all that was going on.

Being part of that environment, and being virtually alone doing the things he was doing, and thus having no one to follow, imitate or be influenced by, Atget had a level of artistic freedom that is unimaginable today.

snusmumriken · Mar 13, 2025

Alex Benjamin said:
I don't think this violates any rule whatsoever, other than those devised by academic photographers eons after Atget took his last photo.

Are you sure? I thought composition was invented by painters.

Don_ih · Mar 13, 2025

Alex Benjamin said:
I don't think this violates any rule whatsoever, other than those devised by academic photographers eons after Atget took his last photo.

Speaking seriously about the photo, the almost perfect bisection of the serene view by the tree is almost unreal-looking - like a superimposition. There's something humourous about it - like, "This would be such a pretty photo if it wasn't for that tree"....

I think the photo betrays more of Atget's character than many of his photos do.

snusmumriken said:
I thought composition was invented by painters.

Composition was probably summarized as a set of teachable things by art teachers (likely masters training apprentices), gleaned from their own experience and knowledge of what people seem to like. Not truly invented, not truly discovered - somewhere in the middle.

Alex Benjamin · Mar 13, 2025

snusmumriken said:
Are you sure? I thought composition was invented by painters.

Imaginative composition is invented by imaginative painters.

Rules of composition are invented by unimaginative, academic painters.

Same goes with photographers.

snusmumriken · Mar 13, 2025

Alex Benjamin said:
Imaginative composition is invented by imaginative painters.

Rules of composition are invented by unimaginative, academic painters.

Same goes with photographers.

We don’t disagree about the worth of composition rules. Maybe I misunderstood what you wrote in #289, but I thought you were arguing that such ‘rules’ were not dreamed up until after Atget’s time.

Alex Benjamin · Mar 13, 2025

snusmumriken said:
We don’t disagree about the worth of composition rules. Maybe I misunderstood what you wrote in #289, but I thought you were arguing that such ‘rules’ were not dreamed up until after Atget’s time.

I probably wasn't clear (nothing new here...).

With photography being a (somewhat) new medium, and with Atget not thinking of himself as an artist — at least not in the way we see photographers as artists today — but, as he often stated, as someone who documents, I doubt he would think of "composing" in the same way we do now, photographically speaking. And if he did, because he was basically alone in his field, he had an immense freedom regarding how he wanted to visually approach his subject.

More importantly, the artistic world he was part of had abandonned compositional rules ages ago. As I mentioned, it was already the world of modern art, not only in painting, but also in music. This is the world of Stravinski's Rite of Spring, not of Bach's Art of the Fugue.

Atget's photographs may look old to us, but that's mainly because he was photographing things that were already old to him. His photography itself is very "modern", i.e., in line with his modern times, especially if you compare it to what the pictorialists were doing at the same time. That's partly why the passage from Atget to Walker Evans was so smooth.

nikos79 · Mar 13, 2025

Alex Benjamin said:
Imaginative composition is invented by imaginative painters.

Rules of composition are invented by unimaginative, academic painters.

Same goes with photographers.

I was ironically referring to the "Rule of Thirds"
And you know what Bill Brandt whom you quote in your profile said about the rules of composition, right?

koraks · Mar 13, 2025

Mike Lopez said:
How very smug. Frankly, your arguments in this thread read as though they are coming from someone who simply dislikes art critics and historians in general. It seems clear that you personally don’t like Atget. But I don’t see a need to repeatedly claim or imply that those who do somehow see themselves as innately superior. I’m not getting that from what @nikos79 has written at all.

What you say doesn't follow from what I wrote. I never said I liked or disliked Atget. Nor did I criticize the critique (which borders on sanctification) of Atget's work because of a supposed difference in appreciation of his works (not the man). My problem is with the critique as such - its normative character that masquerades as objectivity, the internal inconsistencies and yes, indeed, the elitist character of an appreciation that's highly self-immunizing and appears to derive from a perceived superiority of some artistic characteristics (which interestingly remain unspecified).

I don't have a problem with people who like Atget's works, not even if it's (in my view unfortunately) expressed as "appreciation of Atget" as such. Not in the least. It's fine. I personally would have found it great if this thread had been about appreciation in the sense of "look at this one he made, let's marvel at it for some time", and the worst that might have happened is that someone would have come along and said "well, that particular image doesn't really do it for me, thanks." It started out that way, but it very quickly spiraled into an embarrassing display of attribution of lofty ideas to a man who's long dead and of whom we for the most part don't know why he did what he did, apart from some very basic principles - and even those can well be contested.

I don't think we need the thick and smothering smoke of incense all over the place. Nor do we need the erection of statues or elites to protect those and point at their significance. Intellectual masturbation is fine, but like the real thing, there's no need to put it on display for those who aren't interested in being made a captive audience.

Alex Benjamin · Mar 13, 2025

koraks said:
I don't have a problem with people who like Atget's works, not even if it's (in my view unfortunately) expressed as "appreciation of Atget" as such. Not in the least. It's fine. I personally would have found it great if this thread had been about appreciation in the sense of "look at this one he made, let's marvel at it for some time", and the worst that might have happened is that someone would have come along and said "well, that particular image doesn't really do it for me, thanks." It started out that way, but it very quickly spiraled into an embarrassing display of attribution of lofty ideas to a man who's long dead and of whom we for the most part don't know why he did what he did, apart from some very basic principles - and even those can well be contested.

You don't offer much in terms of alternatives. Makes it sound like the only choices we have is between "well, that particular image doesn't really do it for me, thanks" and "embarrassing display of attribution of lofty ideas".

Seems to me like the path from one extreme to the other should be strewn with unexpected and interesting possibilities.

Especially since neither extreme is in any way useful to help anyone better understand or appreciate the object of its subject (and vice versa).

Don_ih · Mar 13, 2025

koraks said:
it very quickly spiraled into an embarrassing display of attribution of lofty ideas to a man who's long dead and of whom we for the most part don't know why he did what he did

The tendency of practically all art critique is to settle on the artist. An individual work of art -- you can say a certain limited number of things about it. Then the dialogue starts to slip into "what the artist did" and then "what the artist intended" and then "what the artist meant." And when you expand that discussion to numerous artworks all by the same artist, you start to extrapolate a portrait of the artist as creator of these works. That portrait gets made no matter who the artist is, living or dead.

So there's nothing embarrassing about the attribution of lofty ideas to Atget or anyone else like him. It's actually a natural product of attempting to appreciate and perhaps understand a body of work. These things were done and exist for a reason and that reason is locked up within the identity of their creator. It is completely human to want to understand who that person was.

Pieter12 · Mar 13, 2025

Don_ih said:
The tendency of practically all art critique is to settle on the artist. An individual work of art -- you can say a certain limited number of things about it. Then the dialogue starts to slip into "what the artist did" and then "what the artist intended" and then "what the artist meant." And when you expand that discussion to numerous artworks all by the same artist, you start to extrapolate a portrait of the artist as creator of these works. That portrait gets made no matter who the artist is, living or dead.

So there's nothing embarrassing about the attribution of lofty ideas to Atget or anyone else like him. It's actually a natural product of attempting to appreciate and perhaps understand a body of work. These things were done and exist for a reason and that reason is locked up within the identity of their creator. It is completely human to want to understand who that person was.

Not when the artist is unknown or anonymous.

Don_ih · Mar 13, 2025

Pieter12 said:
Not when the artist is unknown or anonymous.

If the "unknown" or "anonymous" artist was known to produce this or that particular body of work, then yes. Case in point: the mythologized Banksy.

I have a large collection of negatives taken by some guy - don't know his name. Do you realistically think you could look through all those images and not start to build an idea of him? Not start to give him an identity?

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