Word: atget
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...hint of life and movement. Helga's hip has curled out of its confining sheet, perhaps in response to the sound of the cascade outside her window that gives the work its title. Following the gestation from sketch to drybrush is like flipping through a family album of Atget X rays...
...point, where he could inspect the world without engaging it. He had a geometer's orientation: in many of his best shots, people are distant figures, elegantly distributed among the grids and arcs of the city. The Paris that issued from his camera was not the serene city of Atget, immemorial and mostly unpeopled. Neither was it Brassai's close-in platform for the dramas of the demimonde. Kertesz's Paris was like the woman in his picture Satiric Dancer: pert, ironic and caught at a fresh tilt...
...radius of 50 miles around it. They were not meant to be tourist views-he never, for instance, photographed that most distinctive of all Parisian "sights," the Eiffel Tower. Nor were they meant to reveal spectacular oddities; there are no extreme closeups, wrenching details or aerial views in Atget, and the lens of his old-fashioned camera was always pitched at the height of a small man. Consistently, his work declares that anyone might have seen this motif, this sight...
...most matter-of-fact images is of an orange tree, the fruit dully glistening with the heavy shine of late summer, some leaves almost metallic in density, others a little blurred as the wind stirs them. Into this ecstatically concrete world, a ghost intrudes: the shadow of Atget and his shrouded camera falling across a cabbage plant. Mere shades that whisper "I was here" and so wrench the image away from objectivity toward that sense of mutual dependence between viewer and view that lay at the heart of modernism...
...Atget was not a social recorder all the time, and many of his best images are of the single object, a thing in itself, conveyed in the most subtly pictorial manner. His photo of an apple tree in a bare winter field, circa 1898, has a wild, precise intensity whose only parallel, in painting, must be the apple trees painted by Mondrian as a young man. When he photographed a motif a second or third time (as he often did, sometimes decades apart), the images, of village houses in Châtenay or trees in the park at St.-Cloud...