Being Eugène Atget | Los Angeles Evaluate of Books

The new exhibition of Eugène Atget’s images calls for what we’re getting worse at giving: time, stillness, and the willingness to see.

IN THE RECENT exhibition on the International Center of Photography in New York, Eugène Atget: The Making of a Reputation, round 80 pictures grasp in quiet rows, and the very first thing you register is that, frankly, they’re boring. There isn’t any drama of scale, no saturated colour, no graphic punch: an empty staircase; a store entrance, a wicker chair with a price ticket—“2.95”—nonetheless legible within the window. Not even black and white, these pictures are brown and beige. If you posted one on Instagram, you’d get two likes, each from relations. Yet for some cause, they maintain your consideration.

Stay longer and you start to really feel it, an all-over pulsing reverie, each element held on the identical pitch of consideration, nothing privileged, nothing incidental. You couldn’t have seen it from throughout the room. There is a heaviness in regards to the compositions, frontal, direct, the consequence of a person who spent the final 30 years of his life hauling an 18×24 cm view digital camera and heavy glass plates via the streets of Paris, establishing a tripod, disappearing underneath a darkish material, and making one publicity at a time. Some of the prints are vignetted on the edges, the picture darkening right into a smooth oval—you are feeling as if you’re peering out via the photographer’s personal drained cranium. And the brown, which at first appeared merely outdated, begins to register as one thing stranger: not the wealthy, declarative brown of a Dutch inside or a sophisticated violin however one thing extra ethereal, stale chocolate discovered at the back of the fridge blooming white, the partitions of a parish church pocked and smoothed by many years of wind and scuffles and fumbling. Not a brown receding into darkness however a brown distilling towards gentle.

The exhibition, curated by David Campany, doesn’t fake to be complete. What it gives is an argument. This is a present much less about Atget than about what occurred to him after he died: how an aged business photographer who marketed his providers with a door signal studying “Documents pour artistes” and bought prints to decorators, architects, and antiquarians got here to be thought to be one of many founders of contemporary images. That transformation was largely the work of 1 girl, and the story of her 40-year marketing campaign is as exceptional as the images themselves.

Berenice Abbott first encountered Atget’s pictures in 1925, whereas working as Man Ray’s darkroom assistant just a few doorways down the identical road. Man Ray had hung Atget prints on his studio partitions; he supplied to lend the outdated man a contemporary handheld digital camera, which Atget refused on the grounds that such cameras labored quicker than he may assume. When Abbott noticed the prints, she skilled what she later referred to as a sudden flash of recognition—the shock, she mentioned, of realism unadorned. The “subjects were not sensational, but nevertheless shocking in their very familiarity,” she wrote. She started visiting Atget’s studio, wanting via his albums, shopping for prints when she may afford the 5 or 10 francs he charged. She referred to as him a “Balzac of the camera” and inspired Jean Cocteau, Robert McAlmon, and James Joyce to purchase from him. The surrealists took discover. In 1926, 4 of Atget’s pictures appeared in La Révolution surréaliste, uncredited at his personal insistence. “Don’t put my name on it,” he informed Man Ray. “These are simply documents I make.” The surrealists noticed city dreamlife and involuntary poetry. Abbott noticed one thing else fully.

In the spring of 1927, Abbott photographed Atget—three exposures: standing, frontal, profile—the one formal portraits of him recognized to exist. In them, he appears to be like historic and depleted, his shoulders slumped. As Julia Van Haaften recounts in her biography Berenice Abbott: A Life in Photography (2018), Atget had dressed up for the sitting in “a suit and handsome overcoat,” however no costume may disguise the physique’s testimony. Months later, she climbed the steps to ship the proofs. The acquainted studio door signal was gone. She “thought she had climbed too high.” She went again down, discovered the concierge, and requested:

“Where is M. Atget?”

“M. Atget is dead.”

Campany, who has written extra eruditely than nearly anybody in regards to the area between the photographic doc and the murals, has painted the partitions of the galleries on the ICP crimson, the exhibition textual content gilded onto them just like the foil-stamped backbone of a scholarly monograph. Beneath the small, framed albumen prints run custom-built vitrines housing newspaper clippings, journal pages, books—the paper path of a 40-year marketing campaign. Full-size reproductions of guide pages are pasted instantly onto the partitions between the prints: Abbott’s 1929 essay for Creative Art, one by Walker Evans in Hound & Horn, a Le Crapouillot particular concern on Paris. An Associated Press wire. Some of Atget’s prints are put in overlapping with the revealed materials, pictures and journal pages bodily interleaved. It just isn’t essentially the most complete exhibition of Atget’s work, nor are these essentially his most interesting prints. But it’s astutely curated. You can’t take a look at the images with out additionally taking a look at what was performed to carry them to you.

The prints nonetheless lower via all this equipment. Porte d’Ivry, villa des chiffonniers (1910) depicts a easy construction (a ragpickers’ hut) on an open subject. The home appears to be like as if it had been drawn by a toddler, made out of cardboard and sticks. But there’s something so loving and tender about the way it has been maintained. A well-trodden mud path encircles it. Little lace curtains have been hung within the home windows, sashed to both facet. Out entrance, a rudimentary backyard—pearlwort, clover, shepherd’s purse—has been just lately tended. A pail of milk sits on the doorstep. The print has aged in order that every thing is identical golden tone, hut and sky and earth all merging into one heat, fading subject of sunshine. Nobody would {photograph} this. Nobody would look twice. Elsewhere within the present, a wrought iron fire encompass hangs beside a carved stone doorway, each shot with the identical frontal composure. Atget made no distinction: a ragpickers’ hut, a Louis XIV courtyard, and a store entrance all obtained the identical care. No angle, no thesis, simply wanting with tenderness. The first print Abbott ever purchased from Atget was of a ragpickers’ hut very like this one—it was this type of picture, missed and bizarre and quietly cared for, that stopped her.

Abbott’s first thought after studying of Atget’s loss of life was the archive. What had occurred to it? “The concierge had only an incomplete address for the executor, André Calmettes, a film director […] now in Strasbourg,” the biography reveals. “With a girlfriend’s help, Berenice rang doorbells on both sides of […] the nearby Rue Saint-Guillaume” till she tracked him down. “She wrote immediately to Calmettes,” Van Haaften recounts, “anxious to dispel any notion that she was merely an idle rich American with time and money to spend on a whim.”

What adopted was an acquisition that will form each Abbott’s and Atget’s legacies. In June 1928, Abbott bought the remaining contents of Atget’s studio: greater than 1,500 glass-plate negatives, in addition to roughly 8,000 classic prints. The value was 10,000 francs, roughly $400 on the time. Man Ray, irritated that Abbott had had the foresight he lacked, would declare falsely for many years that “Berenice’s brother Frank had provided the funds”—diminishing her function to that of a rich-girl hobbyist. The cash in truth was not hers. It got here from Julie Reiner, a detailed pal, a mortgage the 2 ladies saved secret all their lives. Abbott packed the archive into “seventeen professionally packed crates,” boarded “the speed-record-holding RMS Mauretania,” and arrived in New York within the autumn of 1929 with 21 items of bags together with the archive. An Associated Press wire had already run underneath the headline “American Girl Finds Photographer’s Plates Showing French Life”—the identical clipping now displayed in a crimson vitrine on the ICP—“published as far away as Idaho,” as Van Haaften tells it. The New York Times and The New Yorker put the gathering’s worth at $200,000.

Abbott priced to promote at $50,000. She didn’t promote it for 40 years. In the many years between, the archive grew to become her second profession—and, more and more, the impediment to her first. To keep solvent, “she sold [the dealer Julien Levy] a half-interest in her Atget collection for $1,000.” She exhibited, reprinted, wrote, lectured, and paired Atget’s pictures with the prose of Proust. In 1930, she revealed Atget: Photographe de Paris, issued concurrently in New York, Paris, and Leipzig, Germany, the primary images monograph to attain speedy worldwide distribution. Walker Evans reviewed the accompanying exhibition for Hound & Horn and wrote the evaluation that has clung to Atget ever since: that he was “simply isolated” and “work[ing] right through a period of utter decadence in photography,” however, Evans admitted, “just what vision he carried with him of the monument he was leaving is not clear.”

Abbott’s marketing campaign labored. Over the next many years, Atget’s status grew steadily, via her exhibitions, her publications, her tireless advocacy, till, by the Nineteen Sixties, he’d turn out to be extensively thought-about one of many founders of contemporary images. But the success got here at a price Abbott had not anticipated. Critics and fellow photographers struggled to separate her work from his. Her personal Changing New York undertaking was learn as “Atget-in-America,” a comparability that infuriated her. Her life companion, Elizabeth McCausland, chided her for being “bats to drag in Atget” each time she mentioned her personal work. According to Van Haaften, Abbott informed a MoMA staffer that “stewarding the archive had been like caring for an aged father”—and “she told publisher Leslie Katz that she’d once run ‘away from home’” to flee her personal father, solely to seek out in Paris that she’d “taken on another.” The assortment was lastly acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in 1968, bringing to a detailed 4 many years of stewardship. She was “pestered about having ‘sublimated’ and ‘really sacrificed’ herself.” Her response: “It is always easier to admire the dead than the living … I sold what I could of myself, but people wanted Atgets.”

The vitrines on the ICP comprise the proof of a couple of Atget. A web page from La Révolution surréaliste reproduces his pictures uncaptioned, conscripted into another person’s dream. Next to it, Abbott’s 1929 Creative Art essay declares him a realist whose digital camera by no means “intrude[d] between subject and observer.” The surrealists noticed involuntary city dreamlife and naive poetry. Abbott noticed the other: hyperreal documentary readability, images fulfilling its true objective. But she was additionally an editor. Her 1930 guide chosen 96 photos from an archive of over 8,000—roughly one p.c, inevitably weighted towards the extra hanging and poetic compositions, moderately than the systematic architectural documentation that constituted a lot of Atget’s business apply. Abbott’s Atget was actual, however he was additionally a assemble—he was formed into what she wanted him to be.

John Szarkowski, who acquired the gathering for MoMA and spent over a decade organizing it with Maria Morris Hambourg into the 4 monumental volumes of The Work of Atget (1981–85), constructed yet one more Atget: a formalist whose late work was artwork, not documentation. Szarkowski was candid in regards to the utility of ancestor-figures: “Even small revolutions are benefited by honored forerunners, who, being no longer in a position to protest, make the best shibboleths.” And Molly Nesbit, in her landmark Atget’s Seven Albums (1992), rejected the romantic-artist narrative fully, analyzing his pictures as business image paperwork produced for paying shoppers and arguing pragmatically that the images must be understood as working paperwork, not retroactively claimed as artwork.

Four interpreters, 4 Atgets: surrealist naïf, documentary realist, modernist formalist, business tradesman. The surrealists had been incorrect about his intentions however not incorrect that his empty streets possess an uncanny cost. Abbott was proper about his directness, however her alternatives essentially narrowed him. Szarkowski was sincere in regards to the institutional comfort of his framing. Nesbit’s corrective was important, however it leaves the central thriller untouched: why Atget’s paperwork and never these of his many contemporaries who made them simply the identical?

There is a concurrent exhibition of August Sander at Yale that gives a helpful foil. Sander’s nice undertaking, People of the Twentieth Century, is taxonomical: the baker, the bricklayer, the bohemian, every categorised and filed. You know what Sander was doing as a result of the construction tells you. Atget’s undertaking has no such key. The pictures are open in a method that Sander’s usually are not, which is why everybody retains coming again to braid Atget into their very own narrative. The surrealists wanted a naive genius. Abbott wanted a patriarch. Szarkowski wanted a forerunner. Nesbit wanted a case research. Each discovered what they had been searching for as a result of the images are capacious sufficient to maintain it.

The mark of genuinely nice artwork is that it renews itself. It doesn’t settle right into a single studying. It stays protean throughout many years of interpretation. You can clarify Duchamp over the cellphone; you possibly can put Picasso on a tote bag and it nonetheless works. Atget it’s important to be within the room for. His pictures don’t impose; they saturate. They turn out to be interwoven with your personal wanting, foundational in the best way that rain wets the soil, not as a spectacle however as a situation. Which is why they reproduce so poorly, and why this exhibition, modest as it’s, issues. These are pictures that should be encountered as objects, in a room, with time.

I had seen them solely in books myself till just lately. A yr or so in the past, I used to be at a consumer’s house, appraising a piece in her assortment, once I seen {a photograph} on the wall—an Atget, or moderately an Abbott print from an Atget adverse, which is a distinction that issues. She informed me the story: She had recognized Abbott within the late Nineteen Eighties. Abbott was cash-strapped and making an attempt to purchase a home in Maine. My consumer agreed to purchase a number of hundred prints, her contribution, alongside people who had gone to MoMA and different establishments over time, to the lengthy dispersal of the archive Abbott had carried throughout the Atlantic 60 years earlier. She introduced the shoeboxes out for me, and we went via them collectively, taking a look at each single print. Some had been silver gelatin, printed by Abbott. Some had been Atget’s authentic albumen prints, an older course of through which egg white coats the paper, lifting the picture onto the floor moderately than embedding it throughout the fibers, giving it a luminosity no display can reproduce. But albumen is inherently unstable. The prints had been already fading in Abbott’s lifetime. It was partly why she reprinted from the negatives, making an attempt to avoid wasting photos that had been slowly disappearing from their very own surfaces. In my palms, they felt like little sculptures. Thick, textured, tactile, the floor catching the sunshine otherwise relying on the angle. Encased in plastic sleeves, that they had the standard of relics. I think about them persevering with to fade till all that continues to be are little plates of milky white, alabaster tablets, pearlescent, holding nothing however gentle.

Abbott didn’t simply promote Atget within the summary: she made prints from his negatives; she packed them in crates; she saved them in her studio for many years, seen within the backgrounds of her personal portrait sittings. According to Van Haaften, “Some prints escaped Berenice’s scrutiny for decades because they were curled into tight cylinders that she had never risked damaging by trying to unroll.” The prints I held at my consumer’s house had been the far finish of that chain. Individual objects scattered via personal collections the world over, each a bodily hint of a 40-year marketing campaign.

There is a model of this story through which Abbott is just the trustworthy disciple, the handmaiden of genius. And there may be one other model through which she is a canny operator who inflated the worth of her personal holdings by manufacturing a status for the artist whose archive she managed. The reality is extra attention-grabbing than both. Abbott constructed Atget’s profession via the identical equipment, exhibitions, publications, institutional relationships, and strategic placement that any gallery immediately makes use of to construct a residing artist’s market. The distinction is that she did it with out the sources of a gallery, with out institutional backing for many of these 40 years, and at actual private and monetary price. She believed the work deserved it. She was proper.

Every good vendor is aware of that to promote an artist, it’s important to promote the story. In 1934, the artwork historians Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz confirmed that the legends cultures undertaking onto artists—the shepherd boy found by a patron, the uncared for genius, the work so good it fools nature—observe recurring patterns throughout centuries. The particulars change however the construction repeats. The legends aren’t lies. Van Gogh actually did lower off his ear. Atget actually was poor. But they simplify, casting a clear narrative over what is nearly all the time much more complicated. They persist as a result of cultures want them. A narrative you possibly can maintain in a single hand; a life you can’t.

Johanna van Gogh-Bonger understood this instinctively. After the loss of life of her proficient brother-in-law in 1890, she inherited roughly 200 work and the artist’s full correspondence. She acknowledged that with out the private story, the work had been thought-about weird, nearly grotesque. Barely a single one had bought throughout his lifetime. So she revealed the letters, lent work to exhibitions paired with biographical materials, and over 34 years remodeled Van Gogh from a failed painter into the archetype of the tortured genius. By 1913, costs had elevated 4 to 6 hundredfold since his loss of life. Abbott didn’t have letters, however she had the archive, the story, and the identical intuition. Max Brod refused to burn Kafka’s manuscripts regardless of specific directions, producing three of the century’s most essential novels and a biographical legend that has nearly fully eclipsed the writing. In every case, the champion’s intervention was each a rescue and a remaking, an act of preservation that was additionally, inevitably, an act of simplification and interpretation.

The story is the supply gadget. It is a bit like placing a canine’s drugs in a handful of Reese’s Pieces: you wrap the artwork in one thing the tradition can swallow and hope it will get to work from the within. Abbott wrapped Atget in documentary realism. The surrealists wrapped him in city dreamlife. Each model introduced folks to the images. The pictures did the remaining. What Atget asks for is what we’re getting worse at giving: time, stillness, and the willingness to let a brown {photograph} of a staircase work on you till you perceive why somebody dragged 40 kilos of apparatus throughout Paris to make it. This shaping of a status is laborious work. Abbott did it largely by hand, for many years, earlier than the establishments arrived.

The present artwork world has industrialized this course of. Estates now account for roughly a 3rd of some mega-galleries’ rosters. The sequence is mechanized: purchase the property, fee the scholarship, arrange museum exhibitions, management provide, launch stock at escalating costs. Alice Neel’s work bought for $50,000 within the Nineties and now command seven figures. Norman Lewis went from $20,000 in 2006 to almost three million at public sale by 2019. Lynne Drexler by no means crossed $10,000 earlier than 2020 and reached over two million by 2025. Whether these represent corrections of historic injustice or extractions of economic worth from the useless—who, as ever, can’t object—is normally the incorrect query. It is nearly all the time each.

I went into this exhibition realizing the surrealist story and never a lot else. I had performed some studying. I knew the identify. But standing within the gallery, the studying fell away and the prints took over, their brownness, their texture, their quiet refusal to carry out. The story acquired me there. The artwork did its personal work. And that’s the actual check, the one which separates the artists whose reputations are manufactured from these whose reputations are merely transmitted. Atget has been packaged and repackaged for a century, braided into one narrative after one other. And every time, while you scrape away the framing and stand earlier than the precise prints, the images renew themselves. They are protean in the best way that solely genuinely nice work is protean—not as a result of they imply nothing however as a result of they imply greater than any single interpreter can comprise.

I walked house from the ICP alongside Grand Street. The snow was coming down heavy and moist, forcing my head down, and for 10 blocks I discovered myself wanting on the pavement with an consideration I hadn’t meant. The cracks and fissures within the stone. The variations in texture. Cigarette butts, seedpods, ornamental bark. Plastic lids, scraps of newspaper, chewing gum pressed flat. Lottery tickets. A chunk of ribbon. A UPS label. More chewing gum. Rocks, leaves. Unlike London, which is pretty effectively manicured, New York is gnarled. Pipes welded and rewelded, surfaces repaired time and again, the entire metropolis a palimpsest of upkeep and neglect. Atget’s Paris was the identical. Not the panoramic sweep of the boulevards however the intimate, human-scale proof of habitation, the marks that accumulate the place folks stay and work and contact issues. The snow melted on the pavement into brown swimming pools of grime and filth that slowly dispersed, thinning into clear rivulets, tributaries operating in all instructions.

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Featured picture: Jean-Eugène-Auguste Atget. Versailles, Grand Trianon, (Le Parc), 1901. Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Mrs. Everett Kovler (1963.944). CC0, artic.edu. Accessed May 5, 2026.