The Lost Paris of Eugène Atget (1857–1927)

On view in the Works on Paper Study Room are twenty vintage photographs of Paris and its environs by the French photographer Eugène Atget. Working in relative obscurity, with equipment and techniques considered obsolete by the turn of the century, Atget never exhibited his photographs during his
lifetime—yet he was destined to become one of the most influential photographers of the modern era. 

Following a lackluster career as an itinerant actor, by 1890 Atget had established himself as a commercial photographer in Paris, producing what he called “photographic documents” for use by artists, illustrators, and set designers; by 1898 he began to specialize in photographic views of Old Paris. With the coming of the twentieth century, prerevolutionary architecture was being destroyed by vast modernization projects, particularly the construction of the Paris Métro between 1898 and 1920. For twenty years, Atget worked in the streets of Paris with an antiquated large-format studio camera, compiling an ambitious archive of thousands of glass plate negatives that documented the houses, ornamentation, and occasionally the people in the oldest sections of the city.

In 1921, the expatriate American photographer Man Ray met the elderly Atget, who was his neighbor in Montparnasse. Atget’s antiquated techniques and ghostly images of deserted streets and shop windows were a revelation to Man Ray, who bought fifty of his photographs and introduced him to members of his artistic circle, including the preeminent American photographer Bernice Abbott, as well as to Julien Levy, whose New York gallery would present Surrealism—and Atget’s photographs—to American audiences in the 1930s. 

Also on view are five etchings by the French printmaker Charles Meryon (1821–1868) that bear a striking affinity to Atget’s photographs. Meryon’s prints from the 1850s eulogize the labyrinthine streets and Gothic monuments of Paris that had survived since the seventeenth century but were demolished to make way for modern boulevards and thoroughfares, forever changing the city’s once-medieval character. 

Calvin D. Brown
Associate Curator, Prints and Drawings

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