Eugene Atget: Itineraires parisiens/A Portrait of Paris: Eugene Atget at Work Musee Garnavalet-Histoire de Paris Paris.

Eugene Atget: Itineraires parisiens/A Portrait of Paris: Eugene Atget at Work

Musee Garnavalet-Histoire de Paris

Paris, France

October 14 1999-January 16 2000

The Museum of the City of strange York

New York, recently made known York

November 4 2000-February 4 2001

Eugene Atget, le pionnier/Eugene Atget, the Pioneer

public-house de Sully

Paris, France

June 23-September 17 2000

International Center of Photography

just discovered York, New York

October 7 2000-January 21 2001

Eugene Atget: Itineraires parisiens

by dint of David Harris

Paris: Musee Carnavalet (editions du patrimoine), 1999

200 pp/$3995 (sb)

Atget the Pioneer

by way of Jean-Claude Lemagny, with Sylvie Aubenas, Pierre

Borhan & pike Lebart

Munich, London, novel York: Prestel, 2000

200 pp/$6500 (hb)

Paris: Eugene Atget 1857-1927

edited according to Hans Christian Adam, with an essay on Andreas Krase

Cologne: Taschen, 2000

252 pp/$3999 (hb)

Atget

through John Szarkowski

recently made known York Museum of Modern Art/Callaway, 2000

224 pp/$6000 (hb)

In Focus: Eugene Atget, Photographs from the J Paul Getty Museum

through Gordon Baldwin, with a conversation between Gordon Baldwin, David Featherstone, Robbert Flick, David Harris, Weston Naef, Francoise Reynaud & Michael s Roth

Los Angeles: J Paul Getty Trust, 2000

144 pp/$1750 (sb)

"Is not photography the merely art able to throw up masterpieces from accident?"

Jean-Claude Lemagny [1]

"Was he French or American?"

Justav Stotz [2]

It has been 20 years, amazingly enough, since fresh York City's Museum of recent Art (MoMA) launched its landmark period of exhibitions of the work of French photographer Eugene Atget (1857-1927) who exhausted his last 30 years documenting the architectural record of Paris and its surroundings at the beginning of the last centenary Together, the four installments of "The Work of Atget," and the plush four-volume catalog of the same title that appeared between 1981 and 1985 were called the largest exhibition forever dedicated to a photographer. Who knows for what cause such determinations are made, on the other hand I doubt this one has been surpassed--though the late spate of Atget exhibitions and publications listed above would have given MoMA a haste for its money, had they been a united effort. (If catalog weight alone were a deciding factor, there would be no question MoMA's weak volumes, which until recently remained the standard work in succession the photographer, in English or any other language, had been outdone.) That the present Atget revi val represents no single view of the elusive photographer, if it be not that a handful of revisionist the sames alongside some traditionalist retrenching, is indicative of the dramatic shift in Atget studies since 1985 away from magisterial monographs toward more guarded, typically more historically and politically minded readings of the photographer's vast archive. Just who was Atget, and what did he think he was doing? These questions continue to determine where united stands on many of the pivotal issues in the history of photography, and its place in today's museums.

The Work of Atget was the work of John Szarkowski, now retired Director of MoMA's Photography Department, and his then assistant Maria Morris Hambourg (who since created and now heads the Department of Photographs at recently made known York's Metropolitan Museum of Art). Szarkowski is undeniably right to insist, as he does in his newly come return to the subject, Atget,

The single in the greatest degree important contribution to Atget scholarship is infallibly that made by Maria Hambourg, when she established, in the early nineteen eighties, that Atget had divided his work into thirteen categories, or series, one small and some large, and when she identified the numerical successions by which these categories were identified in Atget's file. From these data she was able to bring into view a chart that enabled the peacefulness of us, for the first time, to date Atget's pictures with reasonable certainty.

At the same time, she estimated Atget's total production--the pictures that he saved--at about 8500 pictures. [3]

In 1968 MoMA acquired a certain 5000 Atget prints and a certain number of 1300 negatives from American photographer Berenice Abbott, who purchased the remains of the older photographer's studio from his estate. This makes MoMA's Atget collection by means of far the most substantial forward this side of the Atlantic. Significant collections of Atget prints and negatives exist in the archives of several Paris libraries and museums that bought from him during his lifetime (notably the Bibliotheque Nationale, the Bibliotheque Historique de la Ville de Paris, the Ecole de Beaux-Arts, the Musee de la Ville de Paris [Musee Carnavalet] and the Service Photographique de cenotaphs Historiques), but until quite not long ago these institutions were not in the habit of regarding so historical materials as art. The American obsession with Atget started that.

No single debates that Atget began his photographic career (in 1887 yet he would not begin photographing Paris for another 10 years) as a stock photographer. He advertised "documents for artists" ("documents pour artistes"), moreover evidently made the bulk of his living from sales to institutions, particularly those that catered to the tastes of architectural connoisseurs who lamented the demise of aged Paris (le Vieux Paris), or remnants of the city dating back to before the Revolution of 1789 Paris was substantially rebuilt in the 1850 and '60 by the agency of Napolean III's Prefect Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann, who carved up of advanced age neighborhoods to lay wide boulevards effectively leveling the largest medieval city in Europe to create a recent imperial capitol in its place. It was an "urban renewal" program of which latter-day bulldozer builders like Robert Mose (who made of recent origin York City fit for highways a hundred years later) would have been conceited but the movement had its detractors, distant from whom Atget continued to make his living at least until 1920 That year Atget sold athwart 2600 of his 18 x 24 cm glass negatives--containing, he boasted, "all of olden Paris" [4]--to the Monuments Historiques, for the substantial any amount of 10,000 francs. He was, arguably, liberated of his project, and of the care of his negatives, which he had barely preserv between the walls of the bombardments of the First World War, during which he ceased photographing. however Atget kept working, making many of the pictures for which he is now remembered during the remaining seven years of his life.