Eugene Atget Appreciation

[DREW WILEY]

Maybe off times of day would be less crowded? The best modern shots I have seen of certain outdoor attractions at Versailles were taken in the evening.

 

[Arthurwg]

I wonder how much of that is Berenice Abbott's printing skills?

There's plenty of original Atget contact prints on the market, with Atget's notations in pencil on the back. The lesser ones aren't too expensive. I own one I bought many years ago.

 

[DREW WILEY]

Certainly not all Atget's photos were home runs. He made his living as a commercial photographer. The same can be said of Edward Weston and Ansel Adams, who also made many commercial images which are not particularly remarkable, and relatively cheap to acquire even today. In terms of his Atget's more personal work, some of it was deliberately nostalgic, but another big portion of it was hyper-modern. One either responds to his compositions, or they do not. That's always the case. Today, with a chance encounter, the average person would probably toss one of his prints into the trashcan, while someone else, if they had the means, would spend a hundred thousand dollars to collect the same image.

 

[Pieter12]

There's plenty of original Atget contact prints on the market, with Atget's notations in pencil on the back. The lesser ones aren't too expensive. I own one I bought many years ago.

I certainly understand that and it's great you own and Atget. Just wondering if the ones everyone is raving about might have been printed by Abbott.

 

[Arthurwg]

I certainly understand that and it's great you own and Atget. Just wondering if the ones everyone is raving about might have been printed by Abbott.

Good question. I think all original Atget prints were contacts, 6 1/2" x 8".

 

[Arthurwg]

If you want a definitive answer, contact I Photo Central.

 

[Pieter12]

If you want a definitive answer, contact I Photo Central.

Maybe if the print is an albumen print, it was probably printed by Atget, silver gelatin by Abbott?

 

[Alex Benjamin]

Maybe if the print is an albumen print, it was probably printed by Atget, silver gelatin by Abbott?

Here's an exerpt from a paper presented in 2006 by Camille Moore to the Photography and Conservation Departments of the Museum of Modern Art in New York :

There has been some variation in the literature about the different types of photographic papers that Atget used. In her thesis, Maria Morris Hambourg noted that Atget's photographic plates and papers were produced by the French photographic company Lumière-Jougla. However, Atget could not have used these materials exclusively, as Antoine Lumière (1840–1911), who had been making photographic negatives since 1881, did not purchase the Société Jougla until 1911 (Sixou 2003). Hambourg noted five different types of photographic papers used by the photographer:

• A collodion paper that Atget had to sensitize himself that has a “thin, shiny, and highly reticulated surface.” These prints are now usually “quite faded.”
• A pre-sensitized albumen paper on Rives BFK no. 74 paper. Hambourg notes that this is the only paper Atget used between 1900 and 1915.
• A gelatin silver printing out paper. Hambourg notes Atget used this paper from during or just after World War I until the end of his life in 1927.
• A matte albumen paper, noted by Hambourg for its “velvety surface.” Hambourg notes Atget used this paper after World War I.
• Another type of matte albumen paper, also noted as being used after the war.

In the 1981 publication, The Work of Atget by Hambourg and Szarkowski, which is in part based on Hambourg's earlier thesis, four types of photographic papers are listed:

• Albumen paper, which is identified as the only paper Atget used prior to 1914.
• Matte albumen or arrowroot paper, again noted for its soft, velvety texture and cool grey-violet image color. Szarkowsi and Hambourg note that these photographs are often referred to as “arrowroot” prints.
• A glossy paper with a baryta layer.
• A matte paper with a baryta layer that did not have the same “sueded nap” of the arrowroot paper. Szarkowski and Hambourg suggested that Atget rarely used this paper.

In 1987, Cartier Bresson conducted a study on thirty Atget prints in Parisian collections, ranging in date from 1890 to 1923. She used a variety of methods to characterize the photographic papers, including visual analysis under the microscope, analysis of cross sections, micro chemical analysis (spot testing), and X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy. In her survey Cartier Bresson identified three different types of photographic papers:

• Albumen paper
• Gelatin silver printing out paper
• Matte albumen paper.

The presence of albumen on the albumen and matte albumen papers, starch on the matte albumen paper, and gelatin on the gelatin silver printing out paper were confirmed by micro-chemical spot testing. In addition, XRF analysis confirmed that despite the prints' different image colors, all appeared to have been toned with gold. Cartier Bresson also noted that several of the albumen prints were coated with wax or varnish.

In addition to photographic prints made by Atget, Berenice Abbott made prints from his negatives on silver gelatin developing out papers. In a 2005 study carried out at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, FTIR and SEM analysis of Atget's and Abbott's prints found that Atget used albumen, gelatin, matte albumen, and matte gelatin papers.

Topics in Photographic Preservation

 

[snusmumriken]

As we walk and look at the world around us, we see glimpses of things that are static and/or people moving within our vision. Life moves on leaving you with little memory of a single image at an exact point in time. When you straighten the horizon or crop what you consider to be unbalancing, you are creating your own view of what you want other people to see and loosing the original composition which was perhaps closer to that impressionistic fraction in time and space. Atget puts you in that time and space.

But is that all he did? I certainly love to look at his images en masse for the nostalgia, stillness and sadness they produce. It seems to me, though, that he was working seriously to achieve something more than just a document or a frozen moment, otherwise why did he return repeatedly to particular locations at Versailles and St Cloud? He seems to have been seeking artistic perfection. But then, given the slow and deliberate nature of using a plate camera, why did he ever get his horizons crooked?

Of course, Atget was denied any opportunity to select a portfolio by which he would have wanted to be remembered as an artist. He wasn't given the chance to cull failures that had documentary interest but not artistic merit. I can't help but compare his contemporary Frank Meadow Sutcliffe, who worked with similar equipment to record a community of people going about their daily lives, with exquisite composition and technical skill, for which poor Sutcliffe gets dismissed as a mere 'Pictorialist'. I love the photos of both artists, but I hope you can see why I am unsure exactly what it is that I admire in Atget.

Can anyone enlighten me as to exactly what the Surrealists saw in Atget? What are the 'surreal' aspects of his work?

 

[Alex Benjamin]

Can anyone enlighten me as to exactly what the Surrealists saw in Atget? What are the 'surreal' aspects of his work?

Not a simple question to answer—as is every question related to the Surrealists, one of the most complex artistic movement to understand.

Do you read French? If so, here's an excellent essay on how the Surrealists "recuperated" Atget to make his work (or at least part of it) fit their vision—a typical Surrealist stand, as, as a serf-described revolutionnary movement, they spent a lot of time reading figures of the past as predecessors of their own aesthetics and philosophy. In the case of Atget, this is made even more complicated by the fact that he was integrated as a precurser of Surrealism by post-surrealist writers and critics who did not necessarily belon to the Surrealist movement.

Atget, figure réfléchie du surréalisme

Les tenants de l'avant-garde photographique des années 20 ont fait d'Eugène Atget, mort en 1927, le père fondateur de la photographie moderne. Cela fut d'autant plus facile que cette reconnaissa...

journals.openedition.org

 

[snusmumriken]

Not a simple question to answer—as is every question related to the Surrealists, one of the most complex artistic movement to understand.

Do you read French? If so, here's an excellent essay on how the Surrealists "recuperated" Atget to make his work (or at least part of it) fit their vision—a typical Surrealist stand, as, as a serf-described revolutionnary movement, they spent a lot of time reading figures of the past as predecessors of their own aesthetics and philosophy. In the case of Atget, this is made even more complicated by the fact that he was integrated as a precurser of Surrealism by post-surrealist writers and critics who did not necessarily belon to the Surrealist movement.

Atget, figure réfléchie du surréalisme

Les tenants de l'avant-garde photographique des années 20 ont fait d'Eugène Atget, mort en 1927, le père fondateur de la photographie moderne. Cela fut d'autant plus facile que cette reconnaissa...

journals.openedition.org

Thanks very much for that. It challenges my schoolboy French, but with computer help I will get through it!

I know they were (in a strangely inconsistent way) communists, but I presume you meant “self-described” rather than “serf-described”?

 

[DREW WILEY]

Atget could be about as "surreal" as it gets for direct unmanipulated photography. But I'm referring to our general modern use of that term. What the contemporaneous surrealists found as inspiration in him was better represented by the handful of shots they reproduced in their own literature, including an iron staircase railing which seemed especially serpent-like. But I have in mind more the way he turned ghost-like reflections of manakins in store windows into as if living persons, or his mysterious anthropomorphisms of statuary in the haze, or how he made carousel horses seem as if alive and real. There are psychological layers there than nobody else to this day has simulated so well.

What was he actually thinking? Who knows? Sometimes a written manifesto just waters things down; and he didn't leave anything like that behind anyway. In any event, what he ultimately meant by a "document" has as much to do with his own unspoken inner psychology as any tangible place or date in time. That's what I like about it. There is just so much complexity that it can't be neatly pigeonholed into nice little taxonomic categories, even surrealism itself. For his deliberate graphic and compositional strategies, Hambourg has probably explained that as good as anyone.

 

[cliveh]

I believe this image is one of many that got him noticed by surrealists. How odd that he should position his camera so it was reflected in the mirror.

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

I believe this image is one of many that got him noticed by surrealists. How odd that he should position his camera so it was reflected in the mirror.

View attachment 379961

Maier did that all the time except she was in the mirror. She wasn't as humble.

 

[Arthurwg]

I think the imagine most associated with the surrealists was the picture of a group watching a solar eclipse through some sort of backend glass. It was indeed used in a surrealist publication, but after that I think Atget no longer wanted to be identified with them. But oddly enough I can't find the picture in any of my Atget books.

 

[GLS]

I believe this image is one of many that got him noticed by surrealists. How odd that he should position his camera so it was reflected in the mirror.

View attachment 379961

It may have been unavoidable to achieve the composition he desired.

 

[DREW WILEY]

Cliveh, the view is already angled, and it would have been easy for him to move the camera a couple feet further to the side. I think his inclusion of the camera in the mirror reflection was deliberate. And the way he did it does factor in the overall composition if you trace the dark upsweep of the right side of the darkcloth reflection right up onto the dark left upsweep of the ornamental cloth. Then the right side of clock upsweeps onto a candelabrum, which in turn downsweeps to the shadow on the side of the chair to the right. Then there is a parallel mimicry of wall ornamentation and fabric design, made secondary by its relative bleached-out look, causing the dark values to almost float upon the surface plane rather than sink into it. The balancing is meticulous and sophisticated.

Atget was obsessed with reflections. But when Lee Friedlander and certain other starting taking self-reflections with cameras in deliberate imitation of Atget, I find that rather wannabee, even corny. Now it's as common as Dunkin Donuts, but as stale as day old ones. Atget is a hard act to follow.

 

[cliveh]

Cliveh, the view is already angled, and it would have been easy for him to move the camera a couple feet further to the side. I think his inclusion of the camera in the mirror reflection was deliberate. He was obsessed with reflections. But when Lee Friedlander and certain other starting taking self-reflections with cameras in deliberate imitation of Atget, I found that wannabee, even corny. Now it's as common as Dunkin Donuts. Atget is a hard act to follow.

No, I think it is more than that. It is almost as though he is confronting a process of visual recording without any conscious involvement of his own presence. Him and his camera being there are of no consequence.

 

[Pieter12]

Not a simple question to answer—as is every question related to the Surrealists, one of the most complex artistic movement to understand.

Do you read French? If so, here's an excellent essay on how the Surrealists "recuperated" Atget to make his work (or at least part of it) fit their vision—a typical Surrealist stand, as, as a serf-described revolutionnary movement, they spent a lot of time reading figures of the past as predecessors of their own aesthetics and philosophy. In the case of Atget, this is made even more complicated by the fact that he was integrated as a precurser of Surrealism by post-surrealist writers and critics who did not necessarily belon to the Surrealist movement.

Atget, figure réfléchie du surréalisme

Les tenants de l'avant-garde photographique des années 20 ont fait d'Eugène Atget, mort en 1927, le père fondateur de la photographie moderne. Cela fut d'autant plus facile que cette reconnaissa...

journals.openedition.org

A quick reading of the article boils down to a few points for me. First, the surrealists saw Atget's work as being more modern than what was being done at the time and embraced that. Second, they saw parallels with de Chirico's paintings of uninhabited, imagined citiscapes only populated by statues. Then, something I'm not sure I see in Atget, they felt there was a naif component to his work, drawing comparison with Rousseau. The surrealists published some of Atget's photos accompanied by texts fantasizing what may have happened or been happening in the scene outside the photograph or before or after the photo was taken. Plus, Atget died in 1927, 10 years into the Surrealist movement.

 

[DREW WILEY]

I love de Chirico's earlier work. It was not entirely uninhabited. The painting of a girl playing with a hoop in the street seems even more lonely and introspective than if no figures had been in the scene. Reminds me of the loneliness of Kristoffersen's "Sunday Morning Coming Down" : "Theres nuthin' short of dying which reminds me of that sound". He actually died two days ago.

Cliveh - I have to disagree with you. He was deeply aware of at least the presence of his camera within the scene. I tried to explain its importance to the overall composition. Perhaps much of Atget's formal compositional strategies came into being through trial and error, combined with intuition, and later became second-nature. But they certainly weren't accidental or random. He knew what he was doing. In the mirror and clock image being discussed, the reflection of his camera setup de facto becomes yet another deliberate ornamental complement to the already present baroque ones. His own presence is barely detectable behind the draping pleats - perhaps too much has been made of that secondary aspect.

 

[snusmumriken]

I too have worked through the article referred to above by @Alex Benjamin. I have also re-read the forewords to the 3 books on Atget in my possession. It seems to me that the Surrealists’ appropriation of Atget is almost irrelevant to how we see Atget’s work now; or to anything that Atget strive to achieve, consciously or unconsciously. Of course, we can’t escape the fact that we are viewing his photos with today’s eyes, which arguably adds layers of significance. But it’s noteworthy that almost nobody today remembers the fictitious captions and narratives that some Surrealists attached to Atget’s photos, whereas his photos do affect many of us directly.

Some commentators read absurd significance into the photos. “Atget photographs a Romanesque arch and adds a distant treetop as a fanciful, crowning embellishment to the archway’s rigid form” (Benn Lifson, in the Aperture monograph). IMHO, the tree happened to be there, and either Atget didn’t see it or he couldn’t avoid it. In fact, if Lugano hadn’t pointed it out, I wouldn’t have seen it either. Atget certainly didn’t put it there, and I doubt he wanted it there. On the other hand, in the famous 4-volume set I remember there is at least one example comparing an Atget photo with a contemporary postcard of the same subject. One can clearly see that Atget did things differently. And there is that pervading sense of melancholy about his entire body of work.

So I’m drawn to the straightforward view that Atget was an educated, artistically literate person who preferred to photograph old stuff. He didn’t set out to create surreal ambiguities, for instance by denying us explanations. On the contrary, the subjects of his photos would have needed no explanation at the time, and he provided straightforward factual descriptions of their location. His choice of subject reminds me of my own father, who in the 1960s often had to drive into central London late at night to deliver a script to the BBC for broadcast the next day. On the way home, he’d go exploring, driving slowly through forgotten parts of London, noting with interest and nostalgia the blitz-damaged empty remnants of some business or other, or the chaos of poorer residential quarters. As he said, the poorer, un-cared-for parts are always the most interesting.

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

I think we;re all attracted to darker, ancient, foreign-looking places where the people wear different clothes. If fuzzy, even better. It's why many of us like film over the more modern, detailed and sterile digital. (No, I;m not starting a film vs digital debate- Just pointing out why older film shots are more alluring.)

 

[Arthurwg]

Oddly enough, no one has mentioned Atget's nudes. I've heard that there's an archive of them somewhere in the New York Public Library. I believe those pictures were commissions. At least one that I've seen is rather lascivious.

 

[DREW WILEY]

??? Are you sure about that? He did take a number of street views of bordellos, some with prostitutes hanging around out front. Those were rather tough looking.
Are you confusing Atget with Belloq?

 

[Alex Benjamin]

Oddly enough, no one has mentioned Atget's nudes. I've heard that there's an archive of them somewhere in the New York Public Library. I believe those pictures were commissions. At least one that I've seen is rather lascivious.

??? Are you sure about that? He did take a number of street views of bordellos, some with prostitutes hanging around out front. Those were rather tough looking.
Are you confusing Atget with Belloq?

Copy Print of a Female Nude

Eugène Atget (French, 1857–1927) After Artist/maker unknown Printed by Berenice Abbott (American, 1898–1991) Formerly attributed to Artist/maker unknown

philamuseum.org

Nu de dos dans un intérieur - Eugène Atget | Musée d'Orsay

www.musee-orsay.fr