Atget's Paris

BY THE TIME Eugene Atget wrote to Paul Leon, Director of Fine Arts at the Museum of Historical Monuments in Paris, in 1920, the city he had photographed was already disappearing. In the past 20 years, Atget told Leon, he had 'collected artistic documents of the fine sixteenth to nineteenth century architecture in all the ancient streets of old Paris in the form of photographic plates in format 18cm x 24cm: old hotels, historical and curious houses, fine facades and doors, panellings, door-knockers, old fountains, period stairs (wood and wrought iron), and interiors of all the churches in Paris (overall views and details) . . . This huge artistic and documentary collection is now completed, and I can truthfully say that I possess the whole of old Paris.'

It wasn't to profit him much. He died seven years later at 70, poor and virtually unknown (though not the pauper he is sometimes romantically described as). Atget, born in 1857, was over 40 when he decided to become a photographer. He had been a sailor, changed to acting and, when that failed, though he wanted to try painting next, opted for the modern practice of photography, lugging his plate camera up and down the streets of Paris, recording even the most mundane details of the city. He divided his work into 'Arts in Old Paris' and 'Picturesque Paris' and sold prints from both categories - to the shopkeepers and businesses he photographed, to museums and libraries, and to painters as 'documents', the factual bases of artistic inspiration. Utrillo, Vlaminck and, most importantly, Man Ray, who lived down the the rue Campagne- Premiere from Atget, bought pictures from him. Man Ray introduced Atget to the Surrealists. They adopted him as a visionary, and particularly admired the way his pictures had the power to remove ordinary objects from their everyday context. When they put one of his pictures on the cover of their magazine La Revolution Surrealiste in 1926, they found poetry in the prosaic. The picture, a group of people in the street staring up into the sky, was captioned by Atget as L'eclipse - April 1912; the Surrealists, though, recaptioned it Dernieres Conversations. Atget was cross: 'These are simply documents I make,' he told them.

After his death, the American photographer Berenice Abbott, who had seen Atget's pictures in Man Ray's studio, bought the whole of his collection and within a year of his death (during which the press raved effusively about this newly exhibited genius), made sure of his reputation. In the trial of photography by art, Atget's work was claimed as evidence by both sides: the documentarists loved his bourgeois subject matter and the comprehensiveness of his coverage; the artists loved the dream quality of his pictures, and found in the blank facades and empty streets plenty of room for the imagination. Numerous studies of Atget have been published, but a new book has brought together more than a thousand of his photographs in one paperback volume, like a fat old Baedeker, and with the same irresistible attraction. We asked Patrick Bard to reshoot some of the sites of Atget's photographs and, as you see here, some things change, and some remain the same.

(Photograph omitted)