Word: atget
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From the untidy, artist-infested neighborhood of Montparnasse stepped an unlikely savior: Eugène Atget. A failed actor and painter then pushing 40, he had picked up a camera a few years earlier and started a meager trade providing stock photographs to artists. Over the next 30 years, Atget systematically captured what he called "the old Paris" in some 10,000 photos of remarkable intelligence and poignancy. In the process, he helped transform photography into a serious art form, becoming one of its founding giants...
...France's Bibliothèque Nationale, home to more than 5,000 of Atget's albumen prints and glass negatives, is mounting the first major look at the artist's work in at least a quarter century - and the first ever in France. "Atget, a Retrospective," until July 1 at the library's Richelieu center in Paris, marks the 150th anniversary of the artist's birth and the 80th of his death. The show offers 350 scenes of a vanished era: quiet courtyards, bustling squares, manicured parks, crumbling cornices and balustrades, placid river barges and enticing shop fronts, as well...
...stand back and squint, you might think you were looking at paintings by, say, Utrillo or Vlaminck - delicate streetscapes suffused with morning light and dusky melancholy. Indeed, those artists, along with Picasso, Braque, Matisse and Derain, were among Atget's contemporary admirers. The Surrealists adopted him as one of their own, enchanted by his gaudy fairgrounds and prostitutes, his near-abstract depictions of stonework and staircases, and the way he sometimes reflected his own image in store windows. Later photographic greats - Edward Weston, Walker Evans, Ansel Adams - admired his ability to combine straightforward documentation with almost painterly finesse...
...Atget arrived on the scene at a crucial moment not just for Paris, but also for photography. Cameras were becoming less cumbersome, glass plates were giving way to film, and new chemicals and techniques were broadening the photographer's palette. Atget mostly shunned these advances, using a bulky, large-format view camera on a tripod - and never any artificial light, even for interiors. He figured exposure times in his head - a relatively glacial 1/11th of a second was typical - and learned how to narrow the aperture to ensure that both background and foreground remained in focus. His genius...
...Atget developed that understanding by prowling the streets in search of architectural details to photograph for his artist clients. His 1897 decision to document an endangered Paris coincided with the city's formation of a preservation commission to help rescue its disappearing landscape. Without official sanction Atget pitched in, setting off at dawn and working his way outward in concentric circles from the city center. He assembled his prints in albums, which he sold to local museums, galleries and the Bibliothèque Nationale. "Carrying his heavy and outmoded equipment on his back, casually and poorly dressed, he became himself...