Eugène Atget’s Epic Record of Time and Place
I went to Paris looking for love. I was not the first person ever to do so. My love had lived in the French capital as a student in the mid-eighties. Now it was 1993 or so, and even though our affair was over—it had lasted barely a year—I went looking for him, or, rather, for remnants of our relationship, in the city he loved. I could not let him go. I met a German friend of his for drinks. I thought that, if I could charm this man, I could turn my romantic failure into a triumph: my lover, who had long since moved on to other men, other loves, would hear about what he was missing. But the German friend was no help. After our drink, we got into a cab, and soon he was exchanging some choice words with the driver about the roundabout route he was taking. The driver turned with a can of Mace and sprayed not his verbal assailant but me. The sting of the Mace didn’t drown out what I heard as I stumbled out of the taxi: the German’s exultant laughter, at the fact that the violence hadn’t happened to him—a version of which I’ve heard all my life. I had learned by then not to complain about it, for fear that I would expose to the white world, to the queer world, just how on my own I really was.
I couldn’t see straight for what felt like hours after that. Paris had blinded me to its beauty. This reminded me of when I first came across the turn-of-the-century French photographer Eugène Atget’s images of the city—in a book called “A Vision of Paris” (1963), which paired more than a hundred of Atget’s photographs with passages from Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time”—and I couldn’t quite see them for what they were. There was something about the preciousness of juxtaposing Atget’s gorgeous golden prints with Proust’s gorgeous language that made me feel as if I were suffocating under all those foulards, drapes, and aesthetics. “A Vision of Paris” did nothing to advance the case for Atget’s modernism (or Proust’s). Instead, it sentimentalized his work in a way that many art historians and curators have. Because Atget’s “just the facts” eye can seem cold or dull, there’s a temptation to try to lend warmth to his images by viewing him as a kind of iconoclastic outsider poet—Grandma Moses meets Henry Darger. But it’s a mistake to reduce Atget’s genius to a “poetic” vision. The term is vague, and Atget was too specific an artist for that.
The photographs, in all their complications, should be allowed to speak for themselves, and I think that David Campany, the curator of “Eugène Atget: The Making of a Reputation” (at the International Center of Photography, through May 4th), has every intention of letting them do just that, but even he can’t help sometimes trying too hard to get us to cozy up to Atget. For one thing, he has painted the exhibition walls a burgundy color, which is perhaps meant to evoke a dark, lush Belle Époque feeling. In Campany’s defense, I wonder how far those who love Atget’s work can get from the desire to soften it for others. Despite photography’s many advances since Atget’s time, it is still a slippery medium, hard to define. Part of Atget’s greatness was the way he made room for boredom and the unremarkable. This is, in a sense, what makes modern art modern: you flatten out the high and the low by treating them the same way. And Atget was a man who didn’t believe in hierarchies of visual experience, who stood for a long time in front of what others might call nothing, seeing everything.
Born in 1857 in Libourne, in southwestern France, Atget was, by the time he was seven, an orphan. Much of his early biography is fuzzy. Raised by his grandparents, he studied Greek and Latin before, some say, trying his hand as a steward on a ship bound for South America. Later, he settled in Paris, where he appears to have enrolled in a drama school, then left two years later. Even less is known about the next decade: he may have toured the provinces, and lived, for a time, in other cities. Eventually, back in Paris, he developed a friendship with the actor and director André Calmettes, and together they walked the streets of the city, meeting and talking to artists. Atget tried his hand at painting, but apparently he was no more talented at that than he had been at acting.
Through his conversations with artists, he learned that they sometimes used photographs as source materials. Atget decided to provide those source materials. He rose early to bear witness to Paris of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a place of increasing modernization through industrialization, and to reflect those changes in photographs for “real” artists to interpret. His companions were his enormous camera, a wooden tripod, and boxes of glass plates, all of which he carried with him.
Art history provides a bit of narrative luck here: in the twenties, Atget lived a few doors away from the artist Man Ray, who admired his work, which he saw as a product of the “Surrealist impulse.” Man Ray bought prints and got some of them published, but it was the American photographer Berenice Abbott, who was Man Ray’s studio assistant then, who did the lion’s share of putting Atget across. For her, the impact of his work was “immediate and tremendous.” As she wrote in a book that she edited, “The World of Atget” (1964), “There was a sudden flash of recognition—the shock was realism unadorned. The subjects were not sensational, but nevertheless shocking in their very familiarity. The real world, seen with wonderment and surprise, was mirrored in each print.” After Atget’s death, in 1927, she bought thousands of prints and glass negatives from Calmettes, and set about making the work known.
The fifty-odd images in “The Making of a Reputation” are all drawn from the I.C.P.’s holdings. (There is ephemera from other sources.) And though I’m grateful for any opportunity to investigate this essentially mysterious work, which pushes you away even as it pulls you in, I did find myself longing for a more comprehensive view of Atget’s range and influence. Still, what we don’t know about Atget, including much of his basic biography, is what intrigues us about him. He left few personal traces; his life had a ghostly quality that also pervades his photographs, which are full of history’s constructions—buildings, stairways, mannequins, gardens—but seem, for the most part, uninhabited. In another photographer’s hands, Atget’s subjects, which show how thought and vision can work in tandem with emptiness, would likely be only a backdrop to the drama of humanity. (Atget’s work is the antithesis of what Edward Steichen tried to represent with his famously sentimental exhibition “The Family of Man,” in 1955—from which Atget was conspicuously absent.)
I returned to “The Making of a Reputation” on several occasions as a way, I think, of surrendering to that emptiness. Sometimes when looking at a photograph, I’m aware that I am searching for some aspect of myself, or of someone I’ve known. And when I find one, I’m thrilled. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a great image. Part of a photographer’s gift, whether it’s Atget, or Walker Evans, James Van Der Zee, or Diane Arbus, is the ability to accept the fact that a photograph doesn’t solve anything, certainly not when it comes to people. We all have a story to tell, but what is it? Ultimately, Atget’s Paris couldn’t mean a lot to me, given my history with the city, but what did, when I studied such extraordinary works as “Ancien Monastère des Bénédictins anglais, 269 rue Saint-Jacques” (1905) or “Parc Delessert, 32 Quai de Passy” (1914), was his love of it. In the first image, we’re in the lobby of a building, at the foot of a staircase. The light comes from two directions: from above (through a window we cannot see?) and from the rear of the shot, where a window looks out onto a world that is invisible to us. At the center of the second image is a flight of stone steps, framed by a wall and some shrubbery in the foreground. The “drama” in both images is provided by the stairs, which lead somewhere and nowhere. What would you find waiting for you if you climbed the steps? Love or death, or a combination of the two? One image is an interior, one exterior, but Atget printed them with the same kind of burnished, overexposed light, as though they were already fading in memory. (Walter Benjamin compared Atget’s works to crime-scene photographs.)
When I was younger and didn’t “get” Atget, I thought of his images as silent, with no action, no story. But now I can see that they are full of story—the story of time and its passage. My visits to the I.C.P. convinced me that Atget knew exactly what he was doing when he chose to make an epic record of time and place. Because, if you want to understand an epic place like Paris, you can take it in, visually at least, only in increments, in details that speak in and of themselves—in a way that images of cancan dancers and bourgeois families picnicking by the Seine cannot. Atget taught photography how to be specific, and how to look without tears.
“The Making of a Reputation” does not include any of Atget’s work on domestic spaces, which leaves a bit of a hole in the show. He took some remarkable photographs of sitting rooms, which I encountered on my first visit to Paris, in the mid-eighties, when a beloved art-history professor gave me money for a plane ticket so that I could see “all the fabulous things” I’d been studying. While I was there, a school friend, a beautiful, brilliant girl whose father was an antiquities dealer, was kind enough to show me around. She took me to a club where it soon became clear that we wouldn’t be allowed in because of the color of my skin. I remember her writing “raciste” on the wall outside the club, then taking me to her family’s apartment, somewhere near the Invalides, where she made me a late-night supper of spaghetti carbonara, the most delicious food I’d ever eaten then. But what I remember most vividly was her family’s sitting room. It was from another century: in addition to the exquisite antiquities that didn’t so much clutter the place as emphasize its Old World feeling, there were chairs and small sofas covered in silk brocade. The seats were worn, and, if you looked closely enough at the side tables, you could see the dust. Spending an evening in that reality—which looked and seemed so unreal—I felt connected to Atget’s interiors. Like the buildings and pathways and stone statues he tended to with such concentration, they were portraits of time, of the silence of time, in a city whose beauty, like its dead citizens, lives on. ♦