Word: atget
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Photographs by an important early French photographer are on exhibit at the small gallery next to the Patisserie Gabrielle. The collection of plates belongs to the New York photographer Bernice Abbot, who discovered Eugene Atget in 1925 and saved his work from destruction...
...Atget, an unsuccessful actor, turned to photography and began the project on which his fame rests--the photographic documentation of Paris. His portfolio included studies of buildings, fountains, churches and home interiors, as well as pictures of art objects. From the outer shell of the city he worked into its living core, moving among the people to catch an unforgettable panorama of faces and figures...
...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...
Last week Photographer Abbott, who bought up the photographs and plates Atget left behind at his death in 1927, was displaying 200 of the best of them at Manhattan's New School for Social Research. Atget's 30 years of patient trudging and clicking added up to a splendid historical document of a yesterday Paris...
...Atget never replaced his old-fashioned camera, scorned such new photographic developments as filters, adjustable lenses and high-speed film. In his old age he lived in a bare Paris flat, ate nothing but bread, milk and an occasional lump of sugar. But he still found energy to go out each morning at dawn, lug his bulky equipment up a fountain or statue if he could get a better view. By the time he died, at 70, he had snapped his favorite city some 10,000 times, not once found her dull...