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Background information
When Eugène ATGET (1857-1927) walked through the streets and suburbs of Paris on the threshold of the twentieth century with a then already outdated, bulky and heavy plate camera to photograph small tradesmen, prostitutes, alleys, backyways, facades, architectural details, parks, and streetscapes, he did so in the awareness of being an eyewitness to a disappearing world. Although his pictures served as souvenirs or models for painters such as George Braque, André Derain, or Maurice Utrillo, Eugène ATGET saw himself as a city archaeologist who, while strolling and photographing, compiled a comprehensive photographic documentation of his adopted home of Paris.
Eugène ATGET remained largely unknown during his lifetime. His photography, with its precision and documentary sharpness, differed too much from the preferred painterly soft focus style of his epoch, but in the 1920s the avant-garde of Dadaism and Surrealism became aware of him through MAN RAY. Four of his paintings appeared in the surrealist journal La Révolution surréaliste. MAN RAY himself and many of his friends purchased photographs by Eugène ATGET. However, the photographer only became better known posthumously thanks to several articles and a monograph by Berenice ABBOTT, who Eugène ATGET had met through MAN RAY shortly before his death. Some of the most famous photographers, including Walker EVANS and Bill BRANDT, later referred to his example.
Content
The handy, but thicker volume 'Paris' from the Bibliotheca Universalis shows around 500 photographs by Eugène ATGET, who, unrecognized during his lifetime, is now one of the greats of early photographic art and whose plates are kept in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, among other places.
The order of the photos in Jean Claude Gautrand's text, written in three languages - French, English, German - is based on the Parisian districts ('arrondissements'). The book concludes with a detailed appendix.