Word: atget
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Evans' style is related to Brady and Atget in respect to his clear delineation of form and his almost exclusive use of the point in space rather than the point in time as the means of expression. In this respect he is quite different from Henri Cartier-Bresson, who has developed the "Decisive Moment" with such skill that it almost seems the only means by which a photograph may be constructed...
...Atget liked to take pictures at odd times of day to avoid crowds. Moving stealthily about with his camera equipment in the quiet hours, he was a suspicious character and was actually arrested for spying several times just prior to the First World War. The early morning light in which he took many pictures imparts a foreboding quiet, to his studies...
...approach, Atget was straight forward. He worked without reference to other arts and aloof from the aesthetic controversy that was still raging in America as to whether or not photography was an art. Relying simply on his feeling for subject and composition, he produced sensitive portraits of a city and an era. Atget used no camera tricks; there is no special cropping or double exposures or any of the hundred other devices that some photographers have since used to make photography merit the name of art. The art in Atget was his ability to see and this quality still distinguishes...
...most remarkable pictures in this series is that of the little girl dancing to the organ grinder's tune. Atget has caught a mood that is beautiful and profound. The beatific smile of youth contrasts with sullen resolution of old age. In the portraits of the Ragpicker, Flowerman and Prostitute, Atget posed his subjects. At other times he caught people when they were so absorbed as to be motionless. But in this as in other respects Atget was a deliberate primitive. The technique was not without hazard. In one picture, a view along the Seine, exposed for the usual twenty...
...studies of store fronts are now familiar, not for the Victorian corsets or the old top hats, but for Atget's treatment of glass and reflection, which is strikingly modern, indeed almost surrealistic. His photographs were in fact first published in a Surrealistic magazine in 1926. The study of a tree stump will also strike many as similar to the contemporary Edward Weston's Point Lobos series. Both in the problems he proposed and in his direct approach to them, Atget was at once a pioneer and a master. This is a rare opportunity to examine the work...