Eugene Atget

DREW WILEY said:

Just remember that the originals were relatively small contact prints taken with a very basic plate box camera having nothing but a bit of front rise and a so-so wide angle lens with a quite limited image circle, an outdated instrument even when Atget used it. But he knew this
instrument very very well. Lots of the original prints are now in poor condition due to mildew etc, and other images have been salvaged from negs likewise often in a poor state. So book images actually look better at times than the originals, but do not give quite the same impression. For instance, the "lack of detail", already mentioned, is nonexistent in the originals, because they were intended to be viewed
as small images to begin with. And his print media was itself an anachronism later in life, when his most famous images were made.
So at some point, it does help to see a least a few token originals in some museum. I thing the SFMMA has a few.

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Drew, I once did this at the V&A in London. They wheel in box files on a trolley and we wore white cotton gloves to handle them and I agree that some of them probably look better in books. I have also used Atget's images in power point presentations and when you see some of the projected really big they are very impressive.

blansky said:

You may be entirely correct. But my warped sense of humor always finds that we may just be projecting when we put words to other people images.

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What! You mean "artspeak"?
Anytime I see a description of what the photographer was thinking when he made a picture, I think to myself "What total BS".

John Koehrer said:

What! You mean "artspeak"?
Anytime I see a description of what the photographer was thinking when he made a picture, I think to myself "What total BS".

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Quite.

A good art critic will make good reading. Whether they explain what really goes on in someone's head is a different matter. Sometimes I
consciously analyze a shot, but more often it's some kind of Gestalt or gut feeling. The image might be strong, and I might be able to describe it, but even my own explanation of my own picture might become BS if I attempt to verbally describe it. The most disgusting things I typically read are artist's "mission statements" or "artist's statements". Just shut up. If your images are good, they'll speak for
themselves. I've got nothing against literature. Sometimes we do need a bit of coaching to appreciate an era or viewpoint different from our own. But lots of art critics just throw around a lot of esoteric words to impress their verbose peers. Some actually look at things and perceive them, some don't. Atget obviously deeply felt things when he took certain pictures. Whether he articulated that, even to himself, is anyone's guess.

Richard Sintchak (rich815) said:

Can someone show me some specific examples of images and describe to me Atget's genius coming through? I don't mean to be argumentative or adversarial but I view his work and mostly see fairly pedestrian scenes, not especially interesting or creative composition, and wonder if they were not from such a time as they were shot would not be anything very special. His background story and history notwithstanding, why should that matter in the overall enjoyment or judgement of a single particular image? I could list a slew of photographers who do float my boat (Kertesz, Brassai, Winogrand, Weston, Link, Hine, Moriyama, Evans, Abbott, Leavitt, Sujimoto, Kenna, Capa) and I'd like to learn more to enjoy Atget but j just don't see it. Sure perhaps it's just a purely subjective thing and it's not my taste but I rarely find any photographer as bland as I do him. Perhaps I just need some help seeing it...

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If you like Evans's art, you may like Atget's. Here's Szarkowski's commentary in his introduction to "Atget":
"Atget's greatest student -- and the photographer who came closet to becoming his artistic successor -- was surely Walker Evans." He said more in another article that "Evans...developed, with the help of Atget’s example, a new idea of creative photography, based on the poetic potential of plain facts, clearly seen."

IMHO, to me Atget's photographs are the epitome of "creative photography, based on the poetic potential of plain facts, clearly seen."

The first Atget's photo I saw was this one. At the first glance I wasn't impressed at all. I thought the print must be old and damaged. The subject is pedestrian (even though it's in Versailles). But then I flipped through it a few more times. It grew on me. A week or two later I realized it was great, superb; its composition is elegant and perfect; it is mysterious and poetic. Then I bought Szarkowski's "Atget". I couldn't be satisfied. So I went on to buy the 4 MoMA books from the 2nd market.

DREW WILEY said:

I have the four-volume Atget set from the Met series. Probably the best ever in terms of illustrating and explaining his compositional strategies. His actual prints are quirky little things, largely mildewed by now. So what you see in books might actually look better, or far
worse, depending. He was basically a stock photographer who seemingly dabbled in personal expression over the years. Many of his classic
images, like those at Versailles, were taken late in life. Due to his influence there have been a lot of Atget wannabees over the year, most of whom simply come across as pretentious; but a few seem to connect from time to time. Philip Trager did a good job replicating his architectural style.

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I haven't had a chance to see many Atget's prints. But I did see 2 last spring in Met. I was utterly stunned. They were shown along side with other masters' photos of Paris (Brassai, Kertez, HCB, just to name a few). But those two seemed to have some kind of magic. I read somewhere that Julien Levy, who helped fund Abbot's purchase of Atget's prints, once said he wanted to wrap himself up with Atget's prints. I didn't understand what he meant, until I saw them myself.

I don't have anything deeply profound to say about Atget. I remember not liking his photographs for a long time, but I never really saw them except here and there in books in which they always seemed to look like crap. At any rate, these days I find them fascinating. I don't see them necessarily as individual images, although some are extraordinary, but more as a whole. The quality that they have is a bit unique. It could be that he photographed everything in the early morning or the materials he used, but they typically have an air of mystery about them. Looking through a book of his images it is easy to be absorbed and transfixed by them. I can't think of another photographer off the top of my head who's images have the same type of languid seduction.

There is of course a great deal of nostalgia involved with his images these days. He was photographing the Paris of Picasso and Matisse. One that was becoming commercialized and gentrified in a hurry. One that would rapidly lose it's luster as the center of the art world. He of course didn't know how we would think about the Paris that he lived in all these years later, but he made the photographs that reinforce our romantic ideas about it.

Philosli - so there you've got it. A mere vase, but as imposing and monumental as an AA print of the monolith of El Capitan or Half Dome.
The commonplace transformed into the epic, but somehow haunted at the same time.

The Genius of Photography on Adget, starts at 24:30

http://watchdocumentary.org/watch/t...02-documents-for-artists-video_ec24384c7.html