For those who aren't taking this thread lying down, here's the text of
@nikos79' post:
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To the degree that Atget was an artist, we must assume that his chief reward came from doing the work. He had the pleasure of solving (provisionally), or at least the pleasure of struggling with, problems more open-ended than the most esoteric chess problem, since the board could never be returned to its previous condition, and since the possible moves were not finite but infinite in number.
That also is to say that our appreciation of Atget is of no concern or value to him; it is of potential value only to us. If that appreciation is to be more than merely sentimental we must ask what remains in the work that we can make use of to improve the quality and range of our own photographs, poems, moral imaginations, or lives.
The answer must be in the pictures, not in words that attempt to describe the pictures; but without trying to describe them we might risk trying to name some of the qualities that reside in them.
The pictures are never quite what we would have expected. They are never quite perfectly resolved in their sentiment - contradictions are not edited out.
They are disinterested free of special pleading. They are brave—in the sense that (we feel sure) nothing is made to look either better or worse than it looked to the Photographer. They are dead-on accurate—in the sense that they allow us to know that these scenes will never again look as they look in the pictures. They are as clea[r?] as good water, as plain and as nourishing as good bread.
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