Word: atget
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...Atget's camera recorded a vanished, rural world...
...sense turns on the thought of stardom, however temporary that blessed state may be. Though most photography is routine, the air is so sodden with "creativity" and "expression" that the idea of being a journeyman photographer seems unthinkable. Hence the difficulty of understanding a career like Eugène Atget...
Today, a lifetime after his death (he was born in 1857 and died in 1927), it would seem very rash to deny that Atget (pronounced At-jay) was one of the great artists of the 20th century. But there is nothing to suggest that he thought so himself. In his old age, he was much admired in the more advanced Parisian cultural circles; the surrealists, for instance, loved the mystery of his street scenes, with their pervasive sense that Something (the surrealist merveilleux) was about to break into the world round the corner, at the end of the perspective...
...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...