Word: atget
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...While Atget's work is enjoyably accessible, Atget the man remains an underexposed negative. An orphan, he was raised by an uncle in Bordeaux and worked as a cabin boy on transatlantic steamers before trying his hand at acting and painting. He retained his bohemian affection for the working man, and - much like French foes of globalization today - worried about the petty tradesmen and merchants threatened by modernization and the rise of big Paris department stores. Thus, the Bibliothèque Nationale show includes affectionate portraits of herb sellers, junk dealers and wine merchants, as well as shots...
...Atget was said to be short-tempered and eccentric, and in his 50s stopped eating anything except bread, milk and sugar. He and his wife, Valentine, a former actress, hung out with some of Paris' leading dramatists - though he left behind not a single portrait of friends or associates. One photo in the show gives a tiny insight into the photographer's world: Small Interior of a Dramatic Artist, which is actually Atget's own tidy, book-lined apartment...
...exhibit has another revealing picture, the only one not printed or shot by Atget himself. It is a 1927 portrait of him, looking stooped and weary at age 70, by an American friend, Berenice Abbott. When she stopped by his flat a few months later to deliver it, he was dead. His passing went largely unmarked outside the circle of curators who had bought his albums and kept them interred, mostly unseen, in their archives. Atget would likely have been indifferent to such obscurity, given his preference for work over fame. "This enormous artistic and documentary collection is now finished...
Abbott was the key that unlocked Atget's Paris for the rest of the world. She got to know him in the 1920s when she was an assistant to Atget's Montparnasse neighbor Man Ray, the photographer and Surrealist. Abbott went on to become an eminent photographer herself, capturing the old neighborhoods of New York City, Atget-style, as they fell to the skyscraper. After Atget's death, she arranged for New York City's Museum of Modern Art to buy many of his prints. Atget soon became better known in the U.S. than in the land of his birth...
Anyone familiar with today's Paris will make a happy discovery at the Bibliothèque Nationale: a surprising number of the streets and buildings Atget photographed have survived mostly intact. Atget's role in protecting them is difficult to quantify - but impossible to deny. The skill and passion he brought to that quest make "Atget, a Retrospective" not just a nostalgic trip back to a lost era, but also a living road map to one of the most romantic cities in the world. It is a city, as Atget realized, that cries out to be photographed...