#Jean-Eugène Auguste Atget

[heaveninawildflower]

‘Les p'tits métiers de Paris’ (The small trades of Paris) - French postcard.

‘Fleurs au panier - Deux bottes pour trois sous’ - ‘Flowers in the basket - two bunches for three pennies.’

Photographer: Jean-Eugène Auguste Atget (French, 1857–1927).

Hand-coloured collotype on card stock. 

Published by V. Porcher.

Image and text information courtesy MFA Boston.

[gentlyepigrams]

Hotel du Prince de Conde, Paris, France. Photographed by Jean-Eugène-Auguste Atget, 1900.

[epifizz]

Rue des Nonnains d'Hyères, Jean Eugène Auguste Atget (1900)

[frenchcurious]

Cours Damoye, 12 Place de la Bastille Paris. Ph: Jean-Eugène Auguste Atget (1857-1927) - source Heritage Auctions.

[visionsofour-past]

• Magazins de Bon Marché.

Place of origin: Paris

Date: 1926

Photographer: Atget, Jean-Eugène-Auguste

Medium: Gold-toned albumen print from gelatin dry plate negative.

[semioticapocalypse]

Jean Eugène Auguste Atget. Quai d'Orléans, Ile Saint-Louis. 1901

[::SemAp Twitter || SemAp::]

[cendrineartist]

Early photography: Etang de Corot, Ville d'Avray - Jean-Eugène-Auguste Atget

Sharing my favorite images from the early days of photography… Title: Etang de Corot, Ville d’Avray Date: ca. 1909 Location: France Photographer: Jean-Eugène-Auguste Atget (1857 – 1927) Process: albumen print Source and information: Museum of Photographic Arts

[aperfumedpearl]

Jean-Eugène-Auguste Atget - Doorknocker, 5 Rue Bonaparte, Paris, France. 1900

[harvard-art-museums-photography]

69 Quai de la Tournelle, Jean-Eugène-Auguste Atget, 1912, Harvard Art Museums: Photographs

Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Purchase through the generosity of Jesse Lie Farber, Saundra B. Lane, Barnabas McHenry, Richard and Ronay Menschel and Melvin R. Seiden Size: image: 21.3 x 17.3 cm (8 3/8 x 6 13/16 in.)

https://www.harvardartmuseums.org/collections/object/95930

[miamiartdistrict]

KAMROOZ ARAM

on the ancient arts of Iran

Achaemenid (Iran, Susa). Bricks with a palmette motif, ca. 6th–4th century B.C. Ceramic, glaze. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1948 (48.98.20a–c)

The Artist Project

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LaToya Ruby FRAZIER on Gordon Parks's Red Jackson

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Adam Fuss on a marble grave stele of a little girl

Maureen Gallace on Paul Cézanne's still life paintings with apples

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Catherine Opie on the Louis XIV bedroom

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Hiroshi Sugimoto on Bamboo in the Four Seasons, attributed to Tosa Mitsunobu

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Swoon on Honoré Daumier's The Third-Class Carriage

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Hank Willis THOMAS on a daguerreotype button

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William Wegman on Walker Evans's postcard collection

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Betty Woodman on a Minoan terracotta larnax

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[mybenia1]

Jean-Eugène-Auguste Atget

[spinmeround]

Jean-Eugène-Auguste Atget - Doorknocker, 5 Rue Bonaparte, Paris, France. 1900

[joeinct]

Quai d'Orleans, Ile Saint-Louis, Photo by Jean Eugène Auguste Atget, 1900-01

[frenchcurious]

Jean Eugène Auguste Atget (1857-1927). Hôtel du Griffin, 52 rue André des Arts, Paris 1900.- source Heritage Auctions.

[itsacelya2-blog]

Eugène Atget

Eugène Atget (1857-1927) was a prominent French Pictorial photographer from the 18th to the 19th centuries. Jean-Eugène-Auguste Atget was born 12 February 1857 in Libourne. His father, carriage builder Jean-Eugène Atget, died in 1862, and his mother, Clara-Adeline Atget née Hourlier died shortly after. He was brought up by his maternal grandparents in Bordeaux and after finishing secondary education joined the merchant navy. Atget moved to Paris in 1878. He failed the entrance exam for acting class but was admitted when he had a second try. Because he was drafted for military service he could attend class only part-time, and he was expelled from drama school. He gave up acting because of an infection of his vocal cords in 1887, moved to the provinces and took up painting without success. His first photographs, of Amiens and Beauvais, date from 1888. In 1890, Atget moved back to Paris and became a professional photographer, supplying documents for artists: studies for painters, architects, and stage designers. Starting in 1898, institutions such as the Musée Carnavalet and the Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris bought his photographs. The latter commissioned him ca. 1906 to systematically photograph old buildings in Paris. In 1899 he moved to Montparnasse. While being a photographer Atget still also called himself an actor, giving lectures and readings. During World War I Eugène Atget temporarily stored his archives in his basement for safekeeping and almost completely gave up photography. Valentine's son Léon was killed at the front. Berenice Abbott, while working with Man Ray, visited Atget in 1925, bought some of his photographs, and tried to interest other artists in his work. She continued to promote Atget through various articles, exhibitions and books, and sold her Atget collection to the Museum of Modern Art in 1968. In 1926, Valentine died, and Man Ray published several of Atget's photographs in his La Révolution surréaliste. Abbott took Atget's portrait in 1927. Eugène Atget died 4 August 1927 in Paris.

Some of his works

  Rags collector, 1899

Au Tambour, 1908

Hameau de la reine, Versailles, 1926

Saint-Cloud, 1924

Prostitute waiting in front of her door, 1921

[somethingimworkingon]

Walker Evans, A Vernacular Style

Tickets for London's most popular art exhibition this spring, the blockbuster David Hockney retrospective at Tate Britain, cost £19.50 each. Now you can catch the same show at the Pompidou in Paris, as well as the museum's comprehensive and thoughtful Walker Evans retrospective, for €14.00. (What's more galling: the vast gap between what you have to pay to see art in London vs Paris, or the vast gap in what art you can actually see?)

Walker Evans, Alabama Tenant Farmer Floyd Bourroughs, 1936 (© Walker Evans Archive/The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

The last time the UK hosted a Walker Evans' photography exhibition was 14 years ago, when Evans' Polaroids were shown at The Photographers' Gallery and his work was part of Cruel and Tender: The Real in the Twentieth Century Photograph at Tate Modern. The current show at the Pompidou includes over 400 prints, artefacts and documents, including, as the organisers justifiably claim, the best examples of his work. Alongside these are some of Evans' more telling personal possessions – postcards, advertising placards, signs and posters, which he photographed and collected as he travelled around the country.

Born in St Louis, Missouri, in 1903, Evans was the son of an advertising executive (which perhaps helps explain his fondness for ad posters). Aged 23 he spent a year in Paris, translating Baudelaire and Blaise Cendrars and tentatively taking photographs. Some of his early images in this show, like New York City Street Corner, 1929, are somewhat reminiscent of Paul Strand with their dramatic angles and lighting. 

Walker Evans, New York City Street Corner, 1929. (© Walker Evans Archive/The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

However, there's no evidence that Evans knew the older photographer, and in 1929 he was introduced to the work of someone who would prove much more influential: Eugène Atget. 

Atget’s champion in America was Berenice Abbot. Like Evans, she had gone from New York to Paris in the 1920s and clearly thrived there, studying sculpture and assisting Man Ray before opening her own studio where she photographed the likes of James Joyce and Jean Cocteau. Man Ray introduced her to Eugène Atget, then in his late 60s, and the two became friends. On his death, Abbott acquired the photographer’s archive and brought it to NY. Evans first encountered Atget’s work in Berenice’s apartment, and the experience was clearly a formative one.

Atget's pictures of turn of the century Paris avoided arty effects, concentrating on simple subjects simply composed: people at ground level, ordinary buildings and streets, unprepossessing store fronts and shop windows.

Eugène Atget, Cours D’Amoy 12, Place de la Bastille, c.1895

Walker Evans, Joe’s Auto Graveyard, 1935 (© Walker Evans Archive/The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

In terms of both subject matter and approach, Atget’s work clearly struck a chord with the young Walker Evans. Some of his subsequent work seems like homage to specific Atget images – like the abandoned Model T Fords in Joe’s Auto Graveyard which echo the piles of carriage wheels in Cours D’Amoy 12, Place de la Bastille. 

Much later in his life, in an interview in 1971, Evans said: “You don’t want your work to spring from art; you want it to commence from life, and that’s in the street now. I’m interested in what’s called vernacular. For example, finished, I mean educated, architecture doesn’t interest me, but I love to find American vernacular���.

Walker Evans, Houses and Billboards, Atlanta, Georgia, 1936 (© Walker Evans Archive/The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

“Vernacular” is the word that the Pompidou’s curator Clément Cheroux has seized on for this exhibition. He uses it to describe Evans’ pictures of roadside shacks and billboards, the visual language of America, as well as the people themselves. Evans shot people in much the same way he shot houses and film posters: simply and with sincerity. 

In 1938 Evans started photographing commuters on the New York subway, using a miniature camera hidden inside his coat to catch people off guard and unawares. MOMA describes how he “concealed his 35-millimeter Contax camera by painting its shiny chrome parts black and hiding it under his topcoat, with only its lens peeking out between two buttons. He rigged its shutter to a cable release, whose cord snaked down his sleeve and into the palm of his hand, which he kept buried in his pocket. For extra assurance, he asked his friend and fellow photographer Helen Levitt to join him on his subway shoots, believing that his activities would be less noticeable if he was accompanied by someone.” A collection of these images, edited from over 600 originals, was eventually published in 1966 in a book entitled Many Are Called, with text by Evans’ writer friend James Agee.

Walker Evans, Subway Photographs, 1938-1941 (© Walker Evans Archive/The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

The Subway Photographs in this exhibition are small and intense. Their tight framing and artificial light gives them a dramatic feel, but they are entirely natural. Evans described these pictures as "what a portrait ought to be, anonymous and documentary and a straightforward picture of mankind.”

Some of his most famous portraits, also in the show, share these qualities – apart from the anonymity. Evans’ portrait of Allie Mae Burroughs has become one of the most recognisable images in American photography. A mother of four and, at just 27, old beyond her years, Burroughs was the wife of a sharecropper whose family was documented by Evans and James Agee in another book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Four frames of Allie Mae exist, with her expression varying from anxiety to a hint of a smile. The exhibition shows two versions, with recordings of Allie Mae talking about her experiences. 

Walker Evans, Allie Mae Burroughs, Hale County, Alabama, 1936 (© Walker Evans Archive/The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Walker was chary of commercial commissions, but in 1935 was contracted to work with the “historical unit” of the Farm Security Administration (FSA), part of the Department of Agriculture, on a project to document rural America, primarily the South, in pictures. He spent 18 months travelling, often alone, recording the people and their way of life. In 1936 he started working with Agee, a journalist writing for Fortune magazine, and accompanied him to Hale County, Alabama, where they met the Burroughs family and their neighbours.

Walker Evans, Bud Field and his Family, Hale County, Alabama, 1936 (© Walker Evans Archive/The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

The pictures, and Agee’s words, never made it into Fortune, but with the publication of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men in 1941, the sharecropping families of Hale County were immortalised, their poverty presented with unflinching but undramatic clarity. 

In 1943 Evans was hired by Time Inc., and worked for the company, mainly Fortune, for the next 22 years. One set of images in this exhibition, Anonymous Labour, shows men and women walking in the street in Detroit on a Saturday afternoon in 1946. Photographed from below waist height, they hurry past, a few casting suspicious glances towards the photographer, most ignoring him. Fortune’s text reads, “The American worker, as he passes here, generally unaware of Walker Evans’ camera, is a decidedly various fellow... When editorialists lump them as ‘labor,’ these laborers can no doubt laugh that one off.’ 

Walker Evans, Anonymous Labor, 1946

The legendary John Szarkowski, Director of the Photography Department at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, described Evans' work as "puritanically economical, precisely measured... qualities that seemed more appropriate to a bookkeeper's ledger than to art. 

“But... [his art] constitutes a personal survey of the interior resources of the American tradition, a survey based on a sensibility that found poetry and complexity where most earlier travelers had found only drab statistics or fairy tales."

This exhibition is comprehensive in a way Evans himself might appreciate. It presents a vast amount of material, neatly and accessibly, and rewards the patient visitor with wonderful discoveries.

Walker Evans: A Vernacular Style, Centre Pompidou, Paris, until August 14th, 2017