The sign on the door of his business announced simply “Documents pour Artistes,” yet Eugène Atget (1857–1927) neither considered himself an artist nor thought that his photographs of Old Paris were works of art. His career path had been a wandering one, as he had worked on ships, been an actor, and served in the military before finding his way to photography in 1888.
Atget used an old-fashioned large-format view camera, creating glass plate negatives that were 18 x 24 cm in size. The darkened corners of some of his prints were either the result of his use of a long barreled rectilinear lens or that his view camera had a rising front, and when employed, the lens was unable to produce an image that evenly covered the entire glass plate. This may be clearly seen in the vignetting or circular shadowing of the corners of Carrousel.1 As he roamed the city, Atget carried with him about forty pounds of equipment, including his heavy wooden camera, dark focusing cloth, glass plates, and negative holders. Although film negatives were considerably lighter and available in Paris in the 1890’s, Atget preferred
to work with glass plates, from which he made contact albumen prints. Albumen paper, coated with an egg white binder in which silver chloride was suspended, created a light sensitive surface on which he placed his negatives directly before exposing them to light.
Atget’s earliest photographs were landscapes and close-up shots of foliage, which he sold to artists as reference material. In 1888, he began the work for which he remains best-known: the systematic documentation of old Paris. Its architecture, landscapes, decorative features, staircases, interiors, courtyards, market wares, prostitutes, merchants, impoverished hovels, and petits métiers all appear in his images. Modernization meant that this city was rapidly disappearing, and it became Atget’s obsessive subject: he made nearly 10,000 photographs. Typically he shot his images from a low vantage point, taking precise care to make sure that all vertical lines remained straight. The vignetting that resulted meant that his primary subject was always in the center of the image. Few figures appear in Atget’s scenes and he aimed to have the entire street and its architectural elements visible. To achieve this, Atget characteristically worked in the early morning and sometimes at dusk. Although he neither exhibited his photographs nor sold them to art collectors, he understood clearly their documentary value, selling them at low cost to artists, designers, architects, as well as to museums and libraries.
Like so much work in the history of photography that did not start out as art, it took the appreciation of other artists and eventually curators to bring Atget’s oeuvre into the realm of museums. The recognition of his significance as a photographer began while he was still alive when in 1921 American photographer Man Ray, credited with having “discovered” Atget, bought some prints and showed them to his assistant, Berenice Abbott, who was enthralled by what she saw. After Man Ray introduced her to Atget in 1925, she began to regularly visited the aging photographer. Of their first meeting she recalled, “Atget, slightly stooped, impressed me as being tired, sad, remote, appealing. He was not talkative.”2 Abbott photographed him in her own studio just days before he passed away at the age of seventy in 1927.
Upon his death, Abbott, with financial assistance from art dealer Julien Levy, purchased from Atget’s friend and executor André Calmette, 1,300 negatives and 5,000 original prints (the French government had already purchased many of his negatives in 1920). When she returned to New York in 1929, Abbott began to promote Atget’s work, reproducing and selling his photographs. Abbott also published a book of his images, The World of Atget, in 1964, and she described him in her introduction: “People were suspicious of him and may even have thought him a spy. He must have appeared a mysterious and suspicious figure with his big camera swathed in a voluminous dark cloth. Mysterious and ominous too were some of the obscure, odd places he chose to photograph.”3 In 1968, she sold her collection to the Museum of Modern Art.
Man Ray and Abbott’s enthusiasm for Atget’s work brought him to the attention of the Surrealists, who came to regard him as a precursor. Their attraction to his images was the result of his ability to visually disconnect objects from their functions, creating a suggestive sense of reality and dreams. This included pictures of signage with arrows pointing to nothing, headless mannequins, and merchandise with overlapping reflections from storefront windows. Even Carrousel is unsettling in this regard: devoid of human presence, its empty seats create a somewhat desolate image of an object that possesses a rich history of pleasure and entertainment.
Carrousels first appeared in the early seventeenth century in what is now Bulgaria, Mexico, and India, and by the time that Atget began photographing them they had been around for quite some time in France. Part of traveling fairs, the carrousel was a popular source of entertainment enjoyed by all social classes. The fairs traveled through Paris, appearing at specific seasons in designated arrondissements (Gobelins, Vaugirard) and neighborhoods (Trône, la Villette, Invalides). The Vaugirard was of particular interest to him, as he photographed in that area multiple times over the course of five years, in 1922 and between 1924 and 1927. Neither section of Paris nor the specific fair where Carrousel appeared is known.
Like the buildings and trades of old Paris Atget photographed, the carrousel too would eventually disappear. In a letter to Paul Léon, the minister of culture at the time, Atget observed, “This enormous documentary and artistic collection is now finished. I can say that I possess the whole of Old Paris.”4 In photographing a city in transition he has preserved what has vanished.
This portfolio in the Solari Foundation Collection containing twenty prints of various views was published in an edition of 100 by Abbott to honor the 100th anniversary of Atget’s birth.
Monica Garcia
EugÈne Atget, Carrousel, n/p c. 1923–24/1956, gelatin silver print, 16.8 x 22.9 cm, SOLARI 91.005.008L