Jean Eugène Atget

For more information on Jean- Eugène-Auguste Atget, visit Britannica.com.

Atget, Eugène (1857-1927), French photographer. Despite the increasing importance now accorded his work, Atget remains a shadowy figure. Orphaned at the age of 4, he was brought up by an uncle. After a brief career as a sailor, he took up acting without great success before finally establishing himself in Paris, first as a painter, then as a photographer from c. 1890, using a technique which hardly varied. He advertised his ‘documents for artists’ from 1892, and in 1898 began to make his famous views of Paris, which he sold to antiquarians, collectors, and museums. Some of his work was distributed as postcards. In 1899 he settled in Montparnasse, where he spent the rest of his life and died in poverty.

Atget was known to many painters (Derain, Matisse, Braque, and Picasso bought pictures from him), which may explain his discovery by the Surrealists as a ‘naive genius’, akin to le douanier Rousseau, in the 1920s. Otherwise it is possible his work would have disappeared with him, for the deceptively simple documentary pictures he made of the sights and people of late 19th-and early 20th-century Paris were not greatly different from those made by several contemporaries and were considered little more than functional illustrations by most buyers. Yet Man Ray (a neighbour), André Breton and Pierre Mac Orlan saw something new in these robust and direct photographs, made on 18 × 24 cm (7 × 9 1/2 in) glass plates using a wooden bellows camera with a simple rapid rectilinear lens, or a wide-angle recognizable by the vignetting apparent at the edges of some of the plates. They perceived in his ‘artless’ images a hidden world of the unconscious beneath the surface of the city.

Atget's modus operandi was the creation of picture series on, for example, various aspects of Paris: its streets and shops, historic monuments and statues, interiors, parks and flowers, street trades and vehicles; even some nudes. The simplicity and limitations of his technique, which led him to photograph in the early morning when there were few passers-by, were also the source of its visual power, bestowing an empty and surreal charm on his cityscapes.

The albumen and bromide contact prints Atget sold to museums, galleries, collectors, and painters still turn up in unexpected places. His petit-métiers (street trades) series were also distributed as postcards. In 1926 he met the American Berenice Abbott (then associated with Man Ray), to whom we owe the only known portrait of him. She conserved many of his negatives after his death, and initially helped to keep his reputation alive, especially in the USA. Abbott sold her collection to MoMA in New York, although the majority of Atget's c. 8, 000 negatives remain in France, most in the custody of the state.

Immediately after his death, modernist photographers began to discern a precursor of the ‘New Vision’ in the objectivity of his work, and it thus was increasingly valued as art rather than as ‘mere’ documentation. This process began in 1930 with the publication of Atget: photographe de Paris, introduced by Mac Orlan, the then most insightful French writer on photography. The irony is that Atget himself never regarded his work as ‘art’.

— Peter Hamilton

Bibliography

• Hambourg, M. M., and Szarkowski, J., The Work of Atget (4 vols., 1981-5).
• Nesbit, M., Atget's Seven Albums (1992).
• Lemagny, J.-C., et al., Atget le pionnier (2000)