Eugene Atget

Eugene is not a very well-know French man. A few documented facts and a handful of recollections and legends provide a scant outline of the man. He was born in Lilbourne, near Bordeaux, in 1857 and worked as a sailor during his youth. From the sea he turned to the stage, although he didn’t have much success. At the age of forty he quit acting and took up some painting tentatively, which somehow lead him to photography and bounded on his new journey, his true life’s work.
Atget assigned himself an alluring and provoking subject, the city of Paris. Pairs, the city of art and bridges over the Seine, of boulevards and cafes, of narrow, crooked streets and gray plane trees in the beautiful Luxembourg gardens.
To Atget, Paris was not a dream but an actuality a fact of hard material expressions, of strange contrasts and contradictions.
In recreating Paris for us and for all time, Atget gave it permanent reality by utilizing photography in its own right. He did not veer toward excessive concern with technique or toward the imitation of painting but steered a straight course, making the medium speak for itself in a superb rendering of materials, textures, surfaces, and details.

He worked quietly at his calling. Eugene wasn’t too progressive but he was patient with techniques that were obsolescent when he adopted them.
He was little given to experiment in the conventional sense, and less to theorizing. I suppose he had developed a true vision for photography. His work is unique on two different levels. Eugene was the maker of visual catalogue of fruits in French culture. Atget set himself the task of understanding and interpreting in visual terms a complex, ancient, and living tradition. The pictures that he made in the service of this are deceptively seductively reticent, poised, simple, dense, wholly with experience, mysterious, and true.