February 12, 1857

We have biographical notes about the photographer who captured the above shot. We see in the statue the ambition of this artist to document a disappearing Paris, and he succeeded in a way which made him famous. Such a summary was not foreordained, for Eugene Atget (February 12, 1857 to August 4, 1927).

'Jean Eugène Auguste Atget was born in Libourne (France) to working-class parents, Jean-Eugène Atget, a carriage maker and saddler, and Clara-Adeline Atget. His father changed careers to be a traveling salesman only to die a few years later on business. Shortly after, his mother, Clara, died as well. Faced with a harsh and unforgiving childhood, which left him orphaned at the age of five-years-old, he was raised by his elderly grandparents, Victoire and Auguste Hourlier, who lived in Bordeaux, France. Atget soon joined the seafaring life as a cabin boy.

'In 1878, Atget moved to Paris and applied to France's most important acting school, the National Conservatory of Music and Drama. He poured all his hope into this opportunity since he had little money and was also living in a dingy part of town. Sadly, he was not only rejected by the acting school but was then drafted into the army for five compulsory years of service. Atget, determined to make a career for himself in acting, reapplied and was accepted one year later. His future in acting looked bright according to his mentor and famous actor, Edmond Got. However, his short stature of 5'5" did not lend itself to an ideal presence on stage, and Edmond Got later described Atget as having an, "inelegant accent." In a series of unfortunate events, he was dismissed before graduation in 1881 and in the same year, his grandparents died.'

He did then find photography and supported himself, though he insisted on doing some things the old and harder way.

'At a time when photography was quickly becoming well-known for its documentary purposes, Atget setup his own studio in Paris in 1890. He displayed a sign that advertised his photography as Documents pour artistes (Documents for artists), selling photos of landscapes, flowers, monuments, and the like. His work did not just serve artists, but also set decorators, historians, metal smiths, publishers, and later, national institutions. Atget soon found his life's work in documenting old Paris beginning in 1897. Thanks to the Baron Haussmann public works and buildings renovations that swept Paris at the end of the 19th century, Paris was a vastly changing city that saw the demolition of old buildings and streets destroyed by war to make way for more modern architecture. Atget sought to capture architecture and decoration in his photography before it was forever gone.

'Though his impetus to capture a changing Paris was done all on his own accord, he had also found a business niche where he could earn a living wage. He remained frugal in his lifestyle, never throwing away paper that was not completely used, wearing old clothes and sustaining himself off of a prudent diet of bread and milk (because of digestive problems, but also, he said, because anything more was "immoderate luxury"). One of his friends described him as 'intransigent, obstinate, and independent.' His stubborn personality and thrifty nature led him to also embrace the old photographic technologies like the cumbersome, tripod-mounted view camera that used glass plates. He took this very large camera along with him outside and used it on a regular basis rather than the available hand-held cameras. The same went for the film he used, albumen paper was just as outdated as the tripod camera. When the film ceased to be manufactured, Atget nonetheless was still able to find the film and print using albumen.'

Ansel Adams provides a fitting conclusion to this essay about Eugene Atget. In 1931, four years after Atget’s death, the American photographer wrote, “The Atget prints are direct and emotionally clean records of a rare and subtle perception, and represent perhaps the earliest expression of true photographic art."

August 4, 1927

'Eugène Atget ...[February 12, 1857 to August 4, 1927] was a French flâneur and a pioneer of documentary photography, noted for his determination to document all of the architecture and street scenes of Paris before their disappearance to modernization.'

MOMA continues with their biographical notes about Atget's significance:

'Working in and around Paris for some 35 years, in a career that bridged the 19th and 20th centuries, Eugène Atget created an encyclopedic, idiosyncratic lived portrait of that city on the cusp of the modern era. His career began around 1890, when he hung a shingle reading, “Documents pour artistes” (Documents for artists) on a studio door in Paris’s fifth arrondissement. The sign declared his modest ambition of providing other artists with images to use as source material in their own work, and included such categories as “landscapes, animals, flowers, monuments, documents, foregrounds for painters, reproductions of paintings,” as a friend elaborated in the journal Revue des Beaux-Arts...

'Atget’s entry into the field of photography coincided with a series of developments within the medium. The 1880s were a period of tremendous growth for professional and amateur photography alike, as its commercial and industrial applications expanded. The invention of dry-plate photography—which allowed photographic plates to be prepared in advance and developed in a darkroom later—made it easier to make photographs quickly, while the rise of photomechanical reproduction allowed for the widespread distribution of photographic images. Despite these advancements, Atget used a bulky view camera and large (18 x 24 cm) glass plates.

'Around 1900, Atget’s focus shifted. The city’s urban landscape had been recently reshaped by the modernization campaign known as Haussmannization—a necessarily destructive process led by (and named after) Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann that saw Paris’s medieval neighborhoods razed and transformed into wide avenues and public parks. Those changes, in turn, kindled a broad interest in vieux Paris (“old Paris”), the capital in its pre-Revolutionary, 18th-century form. Atget’s feeling for vieux Paris had been an integral part of his practice of making documents for other artists, but around 1900 that interest took center stage, as he established himself as a specialist in pictures of Paris. Indeed, his calling card from the period read, “E. Atget, Creator and Purveyor of a ‘Collection of Photographic Views of Old Paris.’”

'Atget’s documentary vision proved highly influential, first on the Surrealists, in the 1920s, who found his pictures of deserted streets and stairways, street life, and shop windows beguiling and richly suggestive (these were published in La Révolution surréaliste in 1926, with a fourth, of a crowd gathered to watch an eclipse, on the cover); and then on two generations of American photographers, from Walker Evans to Lee Friedlander. His reception outside France was also shaped by The Museum of Modern Art. In 1968 the Museum purchased the contents of his studio from the American photographer Berenice Abbott, who was first introduced to Atget’s work in 1925, while she was working as a studio assistant for Man Ray. Abbott became Atget’s posthumous champion, initiating the preservation of his archive and its transfer to New York. Comprising some 5,000 vintage prints and more than 1,000 glass plate negatives, it represents the largest and most significant collection of his work. In 1931, four years after Atget’s death, the American photographer Ansel Adams wrote, “The Atget prints are direct and emotionally clean records of a rare and subtle perception, and represent perhaps the earliest expression of true photographic art.”...'


And yes, captured the images of Parisian cats, too.