Atget and the City

Author(s): John Fraser

Source: The Cambridge Quarterly, Vol. 3, No. 3 (Summer 1968), pp. 199-233
Published by: Oxford University Press
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 Atget and the City

Between 1898, when he became a photographer at the age of

forty-one and his death in 1927, Eugène Atget made literally
thousands of photographs of Paris and its environs.1 He was un-
questionably one of the supreme twentieth century artists in any
visual medium, he was one of the most heroic, and the image of
him going out indomitably year after year under the "dreadful
weight"3 of his old-fashioned camera, wooden tripod, and glass
photographic plates is as compelling to the imagination and deserves
to be as well known as those of Van Gogh and Cézanne in the grip
of their comparable obsessions with locales. What is more to the
point, so does his work. Yet the very abundance of that work, given
the fact of his genius, can have an intimidating effect on the would-
be critic of it, at least if he suffers from a scholarly conscience. Only
about five hundred different pictures by Atget out of those several
thousand have been reproduced in books and periodicals, and the
editors of one of those books has declared that "Atgeťs complete
work has not yet undergone thorough scholarly scrutiny, and this
immense store of visual source material for history, art and archi-
tecture remains almost untapped/'3 Can one, then, reasonably offer

*For a brief discussion of the problem of the Atget canon, see

the Appendix. A bibliography is also attached. For details of Atgeťs
life, the most helpful discussions so far are those by Jean Leroy
("Atget et son Temps", Terre d'Images, no. 3 [May-June 1964],
357-372); R. E. Martinez ("Eugène Atget in Our Time", Camera
XLV [December 1966], pp. 56, 65-66); and Miss Berenice Abbott,
passim . Of these M. Leroy's appears much the most thoroughly
researched. M. Leroy's dating of the start of Atgeťs photographic
career in 1899 seems rather odd, however, since the albums of prints
in the Bibliothèque Nationale that Atget himself made up are
dated from 1898 on.

2Abbott, "Eugène Atget", Creative Art , V (1929), 656.

* Arthur D. Trottenberg, introd. to A Vision of Paris (New York,

l96i)> P- *8-

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200 THE CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY

to talk about an entity called Atget if one has not had the oppor-
tunity to inspect at least the greater part of what he did? I think
that one can, and I propose to engage in some fairly substantial
generalizations about his work - more substantial and more complex
ones than have been attempted so far.4
Actually the undertaking is by no means so rash as it may seem.
True, to judge from one or two surprises in the last few years,
there may well be pictures still to come that are as great as any by
Atget that we now have in print. It is particularly tantalizing, for
example, to read of his "hundreds" of photographs of trees and
flowers5 and to have to imagine what his brothel series is like on the
basis of half-a-dozen exteriors and one magnificent nude. (Is it in
the latter series, for instance, that one finds the picture of "a negress
which irresistibly recalls Gauguin" ?•) But the very fact that Atget
worked so much in terms of series - Miss Berenice Abbott, the
preserver of many of Atgeťs pictures, his most helpful commen-
tator, and his best editor, reports that there are twenty-five in all7 -
is reassuring. Atget, says Mr. Arthur D. Trottenberg,

took almost no isolated photographs. He treated his subjects

in complete and varied series from a number of camera
positions. It was not enough to take a photograph of a street.
It was important for him to show the street as a viewer might
see it if he turned his head in various directions. He felt the
need to show the process of growth and decay in a great city,

4I suspect, however, that a whole monograph could be written by

following up the tips given by Ferdinand Reyher in six pages of
brilliant notes to an exhibition of Atgeťs work that he organised
twenty years ago ("Atget", Photo Notes [Fall 1948], pp. 16-21), and
I regret not coming upon them before the present article was
finished.

'Abbott, "Eugène Atget", 654.

•Jean Leroy, "Who Was Eugène Atget?" Camera [special Atget
issue], XLI (December 1962), p. 7. It is possible, however, that
M. Leroy may have been thinking of a photograph by Atget of an
anonymous painting, a print of which photograph is in the George
Eastman House collection.

'"Eugène Atget; Forerunner of Modern Photography", U.S.

Camera , I (December 1940), p. 70.

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 ATGET AND THE CITY «Ol

and hence would photograph a building, as for example the

basilica of Sacré-Coeur, in various stages of construction. He
applied the same technique to the demolition of several build-
ings in Paris. He continually varied his approach to a subject,
not only with camera angles, but from a distance to extremely
close up . . . Among the subjects he treated with exhaustive
thoroughness and in series were trees, flowers, shop windows,
streets, cafés, brothels, monuments, buildings, street vendors,
rag-pickers, St. Cloud, Versailles, the Bois de Boulogne, and
architectural detail of every kind.8

Well, we now have a number of samples of at least twenty-two of the

series,* and quite probably (depending on how they are defined)
of all of them. And even where those tantalizing pictures of trees
and flowers are concerned - almost the largest single series, accord-
ing to Miss Abbott10 - at least forty are now in print, displaying
almost as wide a variety of approaches as seems possible with such
subjects. Furthermore, having been able to go through some five
hundred of the unreproduced prints11 I can testify that though
Atget was a genius he took a good many dull pictures. (Indeed,
even a number of the ones that have been reproduced are relatively
dull.) And by now at least eleven editors have had the opportunity
to make selections from his unpublished work, and there has been
a substantial amount of overlapping in their choices. All in all, then,
I judge that we have a fair enough idea of the range and quality
of Atgeťs work. It seems time to take some fresh bearings in it.

8 Vision of Paris, p. 22.

•To the ones named by Mr. Trottenberg at least the following

mentioned by Miss Abbott in her introduction to The World of
Atget (New York, 1964) must be added: vehicles, interiors, court-
yards, the Luxembourg gardens, Fontainebleau, the Seine and its
bridges, farms, old signs, and towns around Paris (pp. xxiv-xxv).

""Eugène Atget", 654.

nI would like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude

for the helpfulness shown me at the Museum of Modern Art, the
Bibliothèque Nationale, and especially the George Eastman House
in the course of my researches.

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202 THE CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY

Miss Abbott has said of Atgeťs oeuvre that

Here is the great demonstration that photography is a

cumulative art. The effect upon the mind, emotions, and
esthetic sensibilities of the still photograph is due to the super-
imposition of image upon image, of idea upon idea. The
pictures made by Atget with his camera are deposited layer
upon layer on the consciousness. The final total is similar
to the vast range of Balzac's human comedy, where his hundreds
of characters move in and out of complicated relations and the
specific action or event described is richer because the reader
remembers other actions and events in which these men and
women participated. Only with Atgeťs photographs, the direct
sight is at last seen, in intimate impact with a city, a civiliza-
tion with all its amplifications, an epoch of history.
Atgeťs realm of creative effort was not, however, the human
comedy or the human tragedy, but the miracle of the city he
loved beyond words."
That is admirably put. At the same time, though, it can hardly be
stressed too strongly that photography is an art in a perfectly
straightforward way, that a brilliant picture is a brilliant picture
and a dull one a dull one, and that the kind of cumulative effect
that matters most (as with Cézanne, Utrillo, Van Gogh, Toulouse-
Lautrec, Piranesi, and other artists who have 'documented' locales)
is the accumulation of major images. Weak images do not add to
strong ones, they subtract from them, for they dull the mind of
the viewer. Well, it is plain that for all the breadth of his subject-
matter Atget was not equally interested in everything - interested
creatively, I mean. On the whole his photographs of public build-
ings such as churches seem unremarkable esthetically, for example;
so do those of upper-class exteriors and interiors; so do those of un-
relievedly squalid scenes without people in them; so do those of
towns outside Paris; so do those of architectural details; and so do
those of groups of people in the Paris streets taken in candid-
camera fashion unawares. They have their own kinds of interest, of
course, both as historical documents and as examples of Atgeťs
unselfconscious professionalism in gaining a living from clients

""Atget; Forerunner" (November), p. 76.

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 ATGET AND THE CITY 20%

who had no interest in photography itself as an art.13 (Indeed, that

professionalism, that concern with capturing any object as clearly
and as respectfully as possible, was obviously fundamental to Atget's
total freedom from the kind of artiness in photography that con-
sisted in trying to approximate it to painting and that was
embalmed during those pre-war years in so many of the pages of
Alfred Stieglitz' periodical Camera Work.) Furthermore, Atget in
fact took some very distinguished pictures of almost all the subjects
mentioned in this paper so far. Nevertheless, when one goes by the
degree of originality, iconographical richness, and formal brilliance
displayed, his finest pictures fall preponderantly into the following
main groups: pictures of unpeopled or virtually unpeopled Paris
streets, quais , and courtyards; pictures of commercial establish-
ments; pictures of vehicles; pictures of the great public gardens and
parks; pictures of trees and flowers in close-up; pictures of petit
bourgeois interiors; and pictures of working men and women posing
for their portraits in the streets in the course of their work.
Furthermore, there seem to me to be some definite relationships
between those groups. I propose to concentrate largely on those
groups and those relationships with a view to establishing certain
cardinal points in Atget's vision of the city; and I believe that those
points will remain firm however much additional work by him
becomes available to us.

II

That the less well-to-do areas in the city should have been on the
whole the more inspiring to Atget seems easily enough explicable:
the things in them bore far more marks of human use than those in
the 'better' neighbourhoods. Yet if the felt presence of the human is
an essential feature in Atget's best urban photographs, it is note-
worthy how non-existent or minimal is the part played by actual
people in many of those pictures, and I think that this paradox

""This is a partial list of professions to which he catered: de-

signers, illustrators, amateurs of Old Paris, theatrical decorators,
cinema (Pathé Frères and many others), architects, tapestry makers,
couturiers, theatre directors, sign painters, editors, sculptors and
painters, among them Bourgain, Vallet, Dunoyer de Segonzac,
Vlaminck, Utrillo, Braque, Kisling, Foujita, and many more."
Abbott, World of Atget , p. xx.

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204 THE CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY

gives us a valuable point of entry into his creative intelligence. To

explain that absence on technical grounds alone won't do.14 Atget
was, as I have said, a professional, and if he persisted throughout
his career in using a camera that was cumbersome, obtrusive, and
relatively slow, it was plainly not because he couldn't afford one of
the smaller and technically far better ones on the market but
because it suited his needs very well. And if he did a good deal of
his work in the early morning or at other times when empty streets
could easily be found, it wasn't because his camera simply couldn't
cope with people in motion. It could cope with them surprisingly
well, as a number of his pictures testify. I am aware that, given his
subject-matter and the need for relatively long exposures, it was in
fact more convenient for him to work when few people were
around. My point, however, is that we should assume that Atget
did exactly what he wanted to do and that it makes no sense to
think of "this man of violent temper and of absolute ideas [who]
had all the patience of a saint with his photographing"15 as chafing
for thirty years against the restrictions of an unsuitable camera. A
more persuasive argument, accordingly, would be that his fifteen
years or so as an actor before he took up photography had affected
his way of seeing: his pictures do indeed, as Miss Abbott points
out, "repeatedly suggest the stage setting which one beholds after
the curtain goes up,"l# and the sense that people will be using the
various "entrances" and "properties" is a powerful factor in the
humanized quality of the scenes. (There is nothing, in any pejorative
sense of the word, theatrical about those scenes, of course.) However,
I think that the explanation needs to be more complex. If one is
intensely conscious of ordinary lives interpenetrating those tem-
porarily empty streets and squares and rooms, I suggest that this
is because one is conscious of being there in an 'ordinary' sort
of way oneself. And I suggest too that if Atget engaged only very
marginally in the kind of 'candid' work that one sees in many
photographs from the 1890's and early 1900V7 this was because

"The case for such an explanation is put best in Miss Abbott's

two articles.

"Abbott, "Eugène Atget", 65«.

"Abbott, World of Atget, p. xx.
17See, for example, Paul Martin, Victorian Snapshots (London,
1939>*

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 ATGET AND THE CITY 205

what he was engaged in seizing was not directly a peopled city but
certain basic aspects of the city as they impinged on someone
actually living in it in an ordinary daily way.
More specifically, what Atget seems to me to have been funda-
mentally concerned with was the city as a place in which one moves
around, consumes things, seeks mental refreshment, and rests. And
from this point of view the 'candid' approach in which other people
are caught in more or less interesting action can be in a sense
irrelevant, or at least very peripheral, the product of a very special
way of looking (partly journalistic, partly derived from artists like
Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec) in which the observer has screwed
himself up to an abnormal alertness to other people's movements
and expressions. Looking on, in other words, has replaced the kind
of seeing that accompanies doing , and a sense of distance results.
When Atget himself, even, takes a candid photograph of a horse-
drawn omnibus at rest with two or three men on top, the con-
ductor fiddling with some mechanism, and a bystander lighting a
cigarette,18 one's reaction almost inevitably is, "Ah, a bit of Old
Paris . . . quaintness ... la belle époque . . ." and so on, rather
than the immediate kinaesthetic sensation that here is an object
that one might at any moment climb aboard oneself or that, like
Stieglitz's superb Fifth Avenue one, might knock one down if one
doesn't step back on to the sidewalk. Normally, however, it is
precisely such a sense of the kinaesthetic and tactile that Atget gives
us with unsurpassed brilliance, and especially with regard to the
activities I named at the start of this paragraph. Let me give an
example.
It isn't, I judge, mere chance that one of Atget's best-known
pictures should be of a cheap boot or boot-repair store with several
rows of boots displayed on shelves outside it (V24, A7, C33). The
picture is in fact one of those characteristically subtle ones of his, of
which I shall be giving a number of examples in the course of this
paper, in which the eye is immediately drawn to one feature ("What
a funny lot of shiny boots! ") but in which all the features in reality

" Vision of Paris , p 43; Camera (special Atget issue), p. 16. In

the rest of the paper I shall designate these two works by "V" and
"C" respectively; and I shall likewise designate by their initials
Miss Abbott's World of Atget and her Atget, Photographe de Paris,
pref. Pierre Mac-Orlan (New York, 1930). The bulk of Atget's
best published work is to be found in these four items.

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206 THE CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY

interact as natural symbols or epitomizations. The leather of the

boots is supple and highly polished, bringing irresistibly into one's
consciousness the feet walking in them and the hands shining
them. Below them are the worn-looking stones of the sidewalk.
Resting on that sidewalk side by side at one end of the shelves and
reinforcing the sense of muscular effort with hands and feet are a
cumbersome pair of wooden clogs and a battered garbage pail
with the lid slightly off. At the other end of the shelves is a chair.
And glimpsed through the one small window of the store is what
is presumably the white-bearded and be-capped owner of the store
quietly eating his lunch. The subtle evocations of movement and
rest are so thoroughly and naturally a part of the objects that to
introduce the term symbol here at all, with its by now almost in-
escapable connotations of over-ingeniously imposed abstractions,
seems almost like an act of treachery. But the facts are that Atget
does again and again work in terms of the juxtapositions of natural
symbols and that the total effect in the boots picture is a simul-
taneous apprehension both of the lives of other people animating
those boots and thousands of pairs like them, and of one's own
shod feet upon the sidewalks.
As I said, it seems to me not mere chance that a picture so central
to the city experience - and especially to the pre-1914 city ex-
perience, as Céline's Mort à Crédit testifies - should have lodged
itself in the minds of admirers of Atget, just as it isn't merely
chance that Atget should be represented so exclusively by his urban
pictures in brief samplings from his work. (It is still far from a
commonplace that some of his nature photographs are as great as
any we have, not excluding Edward Weston's.) There is indeed
something peculiarly compelling about Atget's city streets that
seems to place the viewer in them almost physically, and I believe
that it is intimately related to his technical means. As I suggested
above, there is every reason to suppose that Atget used the parti-
cular camera that he did because it suited him, 'faults' and all; and
the most immediately obvious of those faults are of course the
tilting of the ground plane and exaggerated foreshortening that
the lens produced. At times the distortion is quite wild; at others
it is almost unnoticeable; but it is there to a greater or lesser
extent in many of the street scenes that I have looked at, and there
seems to me no doubt whatever that it was essential to Atget's way of
seeing. What he got with it was the sensation of things advancing,
receding, and moving to left and right of one in a way kinaestheti-

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 ATGET AND THE CITY 207

cally closer to normal seeing than occurs with the so-called 'normal'
lenses that virtually all other major photographers have used. I
strongly suspect that he may have received the impulsion towards
it from Van Gogh's work,18 especially since I suspect that he may
also have received from Van Gogh the impulsion to document a
whole region in depth, a sense of the rich significance of the
'everyday', and a tendency to polarize things into either scenes
empty of people yet richly redolent of them, or posed studies of
representative individuals. But whatever the cause, the effect is a
continual vitalization of the walking areas that he presents - those
sombre courtyards diminishing sharply away from one, only to
open up again with a doorway or staircase or a tunnel-like opening
offering a glimpse of sunlit street beyond; those streets narrowing
sharply away after their openings have been punched dramatically
in façades viewed more or less at right angles, or shooting up or
downhill; those interminable quais ; and most important of all,
perhaps, in a number of pictures, the cobblestones and flagstones
themselves whose lines if projected forwards would pass a foot or two
below one's own feet, and hence subliminally draw one's attention
to them correctively.20 Furthermore, not only the streets themselves
but the users of them get vitalized by the lens in a number of
important pictures. In one of the best known, in which an itinerant
lampshade-seller is posed in the middle of a sloping cobbled street,
the surface of the street seems to flow down to and past the
observer, and one of the vendor's professionally indispensable legs,
ending in a slipper whose texture contrasts ironically with the
hardness of the cobbles, is also elongated toward the observer, so

"See, for example, "Van Gogh's Bedroom", "Van Gogh's Chair",

and "The All Night Café". The possibility should be allowed for,
of course, that Van Gogh himself had been influenced by camera
distortions. However, after postulating Atget's indebtedness to him
I was delighted to come upon a small black-and-white reproduction
of a painting of a tree done by Atget in the late 1890's (Leroy,
"Atget et son Temps", 359). According to MM. Leroy and Martinez,
Atget had very briefly tried to succeed as a painter before turning
to photography; and the texture of this painting is pure Van Gogh.

aoIt is noteworthy how important a role is played by street surfaces

(snow-covered, rain-washed) in four of the most memorable city
photographs of Alfred Stieglitz.

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208 THE CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY

that the man appears to be half in motion and at work even while
standing still (A66). (See too the poignant and perhaps even finer
picture of a boy flower-seller thrusting his wares towards the
camera [V98].) The same effect of movement occurs with the
slightly elongated wheels of most of the parked vehicles - cabs,
buses, delivery carts, and so on - that Atget photographed in close-
up; and a number of those vehicles get further vitalized by seeming
to extend out of the frame towards one, so that one's consciousness
of them as potential transporters of oneself or of things that one
might be interested in becomes intensified.
And the centrality of the city streets and of movement on them,
thus dramatized, points one straight towards the centre of Atget's
apprehension of the city as a whole. It wasn't, I judge, simply a
quest for picturesqueness, or a need for well-lit models, or even a
professional empathy, that led him to take a whole series of
pictures of street-vendors in his first year as a photographer (it is
one of his greatest series); and it seems to me fitting that the four
that have been the most often reproduced should be those of a
bakery woman with her cart, the lampshade-seller, an umbrella
merchant, and an organ-grinder and his singer - caterers, respec-
tively, to the need for food, light, shelter, and entertainment. I am
suggesting that what drew Atget to the vendors in the first place
was an intuitive perception of them as agents and embodiments
of vital city processes that he was to go steadily deeper into. Human
essentials being made available for consumption, waiting to be
handled, chosen, used in the public places provided or carried
away through the streets into rooms like those into which his
camera penetrated - it is the drama of the city's bounty and pleni-
tude that stands out above all in Atget's finest work, and it is a
drama that is at once physical and spiritual. As Mr. Trottenberg
has well said, "the bittersweet nostalgia so obvious in the work of
. . . Atget is not primarily directed to buildings, streets and parks.
It is, rather, concerned with the pulsation of life in a city which
once had time to nourish its inhabitants in more meaningful
relationships than obtain today."31 Let me try to define that pul-
sation. It is not altogether a simple matter.

21 Vision of Paris , p. 14.

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 ATGET AND THE CITY 209

III

A basic feature of the present 'camp' fad, I take it, is that by way
of a good many of the older works that are being revived one is
able to return to a relationship with the mechanical that appears
a simpler and happier one than is generally possible nowadays. I
mean, at a time when the dominant image of the mechanical is
becoming that of something enclosing one - paradigmatically the
control-room or computer room, with its plethora of switches, lights,
and dials, its flatness, its seemingly infinite complexity where the
layman is concerned - it is a relief to turn back to works in which
the machine is straightforwardly and picturesquely out there , a
sharply delimited object that one can set in motion and that will
then behave interestingly. Batman , The Green Hornet , the mad-
scientist movies of the thirties, and «so on, are all, whatever else
they may be, works in which the gadget predominates and the
machine becomes fun . And it is no coincidence, I think, that there
should be so strong a current revival of interest in those reputedly
golden years of the early i goo's, since it was in them that society
passed decisively out of the phase of industrialism in which the
machine was pre-eminently the factory machine, the locomotive,
the steamship - in other words rather awesomely large and perhaps
semi-hostile, in the sense that the economic forces required to
set it in motion were so vastly beyond the range of the ordinary
man and often inimical to him - and into the phase of smaller and
more easily manoeuvrable machines that were much more within
the grasp of individuals, at least in imagination.
Yet when one turns to Atget one realizes how little he was con-
cerned with the sort of 'modern' aspects of city life that one comes
across when flipping through the pages of pre-1914 illustrated
popular journals like the Strand Magazine or L'Illustration - and
how wise he was in this, or at least what kinds of oversimplifications
he was avoiding. The genuine drama of mechanical speed and force
is brilliantly captured in the handful of pre-igi4 photographs
by Jacques Henri Lartigue;22 it is genuine, that is, in the sense
that the drama is as much that of the glimpsed racing motorists and
motor-cyclists as of their vehicles. But the emptiness of a romantic
concern with mechanical speed and force by themselves, as

^See especially The Photographs of Jacques Henri Lartigue ,

introd. John Szarkowski (New York, 1963).

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2 IO THE CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY

demonstrated notoriously in the work of the Futurists, needs no

underlining here; and the way in which the general speeding-up
of city rhythms could work on individuals in a fashion very much
the reverse of creative and romantic is recorded unforgettably in
Mort à Crédit , a work that can serve as a very salutary corrective
to tendencies to idealize the belle époque. Furthermore, as soon as
the city becomes conceived of in terms of mechanical force and
energy, anyone who attempts to reassert "human" values is liable
to fall into either or both of two inadequate antitheses. Either he
opposes the natural, simple, and pastoral to the noisy and
mechanical; or (in view of the ends to which the force and energy are
generally put) he opposes the heroic and romantic to the sordidly
mercantile; and either way he is almost inevitably going to be
opposing the past to the present. It seems to me that Atgeťs
astonishing poise, his continual voracious interest, curiosity, wholly
unsentimental love and respect for so many different forms of
existence, his Rembrandtesque ability to treat in exactly the same
spirit the conventionally beautiful and conventionally sordid,
issued from the fact that in his approach to the energies of the city
he was able wholly to avoid these dichotomies. A good starting-point
is certain pictures in which he himself took explicit cognizance
of what may be called the pastoral and heroic ideals.
A number of his photographs of the great formal gardens in and
near Paris could in fact be cited (e.g. W38, W68, A31), but there
is one that seems to me to epitomize almost all of them and to be
one of Atgeťs most glorious masterpieces. It is of an elaborately
carved urn at Versailles (C34), taken from slightly below centre
and from so close-up that the top curve of the rim and the bottom
curve of the base are largely cut off. On the side towards the camera
the face of a sun-god in strong bas-relief stares out over our heads,
framed by twined and leafy stone branches; his hair flames out-
wards, light-rays stream out beyond it, the face is superhumanly
pure, calmly certain of its strength, slightly contemptuous, un-
pitying. On the right side of the urn, in profile against a blank sky
and somewhat below the god, is the head of a ram or goat, with
massive horns curving round in an almost complete circle; its
Semitic, slightly demonic, yet likewise wholly self-assured and calm
countenance hangs broodingly over the out-of-focus blacks and
whites of a formal walk, a fountain basin, the end of a dense row
of trees, all in dazzling sunshine. To the left of the urn is the
almost total darkness of undifferentiated foliage. In its tension

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 ATGET AND THE CITY 2 1 1

between Apollonian and Dionysiac energies, its celebration of

light and its reminder of no less natural darkness, its seizing on
energies made all the stronger through art because embodied in
cool and orderly forms, and its juxtaposition of, on the one hand,
natural things (the trees, I mean) rearranged by art and then over-
whelmed by the natural force of light, and, on the other, the
symbolical representations of natural things and forces that, in the
crispness of the uneroded carvings, appear almost super-real, the
picture seems to me one of the most brilliant succinct elucidations
that we have of what may be called, loosely, the neo-classical ideal
- an aristocratic ideal in which the heroic and the pastoral are
almost inseparably intermingled. But more than merely something
that is past is involved. The urn, the statuary and fountains and
ornamental trees in the other photographs, and the great parks
themselves, are available still to the ordinary stroller, and not only
testify formally to human yearnings for ordered energies and
energized calms but also help to promote such yearnings. And not
only that: the transforming and shaping power of the photographs
themselves serves to recall that there are other ways in which those
cravings can find expression and promotion. Let me now turn
back to Atgeťs photographs of the city.
Where more or less straightforward, untransposed pastoral and
heroic forms (often intermixed) are concerned, one has a plethora
of examples in Atgeťs work: classical faces and figures surmount
windows and doorways, flowers intertwine in art-nouveau, rococo,
and even gothic ornamentation, horses rear up magnificently above
rococo circus façades, a deep military drum looms over the doorway
of a restaurant, a puppet-show holds children rapt in the Tuileries
gardens, and so on and so on. It is noteworthy, too, how Atget
at times calls our attention to straightforwardly rural forms per-
sisting in the city (an automobile and motor-cycle emphasize by
contrast the low-slung rustic-looking architecture of a courtyard), or
dramatizes a rural object in such a way as to lend it heroic pro-
portions (wooden ploughs look like field-guns, a timber-waggon
takes on an ominously martial air), or shows more or less straight-
forward yearnings for the rural in the city (a top-hatted cabby,
brass-buttons on his top-coat, trousers falling over incongruously
heavy plebeian boots, pauses in front of a flower-stall). But interest-
ing as a number of these pictures are collectively as testimonials
both to the persistence in the city of certain older forms and to the
cravings of ordinary people for reminders of the rural and for more

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212 THE CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY

dramatic and artistic enlargements of their horizons, individually

they seem to me among Atgeťs less memorable ones esthetically. I
suggest that it was when the forms had become the most thoroughly
assimilated into and marked by ordinary lives that Atgeťs creative
energies were the most fully aroused. And the resulting pictures,
both singly and juxtaposed, can take us a good deal further into
Atgeťs handling of the commercial.

IV

Let me describe, without comment for a moment, two of his finest

pictures of this kind - or, indeed, of any kind. The first is of a
corner of a petit-bourgeois or perhaps even working-class room
(A z)23. A small neat cooking-stove stands on the left, with a metal
pot on it and other utensils hanging tidily from the front. To the
right of it is a fireplace with a large mirror over the thick slab-
like mantelpiece and a curtain hanging down over the grate; and it
is this right-hand part of the picture that chiefly interests me,
though obviously it would be less effective without the black and
shiny functionalism of the stove to contrast with it. In the centre of
the mantelpiece stands a massive ornamental vase with a frieze of
fruits running round it, and out of it is growing a plant whose
broad leaves stretch almost to the edges of the mirror. Five more
pots and vases, as well as a lamp and what looks like a figurine,
crowd the mantelpiece; three of them are ornamented with flowers,
the fourth with classical figures in bas-relief. The wallpaper is
covered with a floral design, the curtain over the fire-place with
another, and flowers are painted on an ornamental pot standing on
a ledge to the left of the stove. Four pictures are on the wall. One
is a print of fruit lying beside an earthenware crock; the other
three are elegantly framed photographs of, respectively, two
châteaux and the battlements of a castle. This photograph of Atgeťs
has been reproduced only twice, so far as I know. The other - a
close-up of the front of a second-hand shop - is much better known
(V29, A82, C cover). Two trunks stand on top of each other on the
left; on the right two hampers stand on top of each other on a very
large trunk; cascading down between the two blocks and sprinkled
over the right-hand one are at least thirteen ruined top-hats,
probably of the sort worn by cabbies; and behind them in the

"See also Camera, XLV (December 1966), p. 60.

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 ATGET AND THE CITY 2 I3

window, and hanging outside too, are riding-boots and livery

jackets. Reflected in the window are a high building with lighted
windows, and what appear to be the branches of a tree. Both
pictures seem to me the product of the same vision; and to bring
out more clearly what that vision was, I would like to turn away
from them for a moment to Atgeťs nature pictures.
When I spoke earlier of Atget's greatness as a nature photographer,
it was a particular group of the nature pictures that I had in mind.
To be sure, there is a distinguished lyrical charm to a lot of his pic-
tures of the countryside - lanes, fields, woods, lakes, and so on - but
the ones in which his genius is the most apparent are the close-ups or
near-close-ups of individual trees and plants, and what especially
characterizes these is their unmatched evocation of natural energies .
Exposed roots surge down banks towards us; a couple of blossoms,
one above the other, are shot from so close-to that they become mere
blurred white contiguous explosions away from dark centres; from
a single base among rocks and water four slender trunks sweep
outwards and soar lyrically up and out of sight, echoed by a fence of
saplings in the background, blurred by light; the massive triple fork
of another tree, bark seething in close-up, fills almost a whole frame,
rivalling any Abstract Expressionist analogues in force and daring;
and there are other pictures almost as fine.24 Furthermore, just as it
is in these wholly unprecedented pictures that one is most immedi-
ately aware of Atget's completely free vision and effortless formal
mastery, so too it is in some of them that one is also, appropriately,
most aware of light as a creative force in his picture-making -
blurring, shaping, infiltrating, vitalizing, in ways that once again
bring home to one how essential to him were the technical 'imper-
fections' of his camera. And if one returns to the city scenes by way
of the two city photographs that I have described, one can see how
it is still fundamentally natural energies and processes that are
being celebrated there too.
For Atget, as I have suggested, there was no intrinsic opposition
between the heroic and pastoral on the one hand and the commer-
cial on the other. In the picture of the beflowered room the stress
falls entirely on the loving accumulative energy and orderliness
of the room's occupant, rather than on any pathos latent in his or
her multiplying of artistic windows opening into unavailable

24The pictures I have just described are all to be found in Atget,

Photographe - respectively pp. 94, 53, 56, and 52.

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214 THE CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY

modes of existence, or any irony in those windows being so obviously

mass-produced and in questionable taste. Atget, thank heavens,
never concerns himself with 'taste' at all. He is concerned instead
with how things function, and the objects here are obviously func-
tioning very well in the psychic economy of their owner. In the
top-hat picture, likewise, it isn't commercial sordidness that gets
emphasized. The counterbalancing of the urban detritus by the
reflected aspiring building and tree interlocks with the associatively
organic form (water-over-rocks) that the detritus itself has assumed,
and, when further reinforced by the associations of the trunks
and hampers, places the fact of consumption and wearing out in a
context of natural and desirable movement and change.25 Another
picture of a store-front is even clearer in its symbolic juxtapositions,
and takes us a step further along (Asi). A plethora of trunks and
suitcases form two intricately arranged mounds on the sidewalk
outside the store, the aisle between them being guarded at the store
entrance by two top-hatted, elegantly bewhiskered, and very gentle-
manly dummies. The sunshine warms them, just as it warms the
four pieces of clothing swinging from hooks on the small awning
over them, and picks out casually a couple of groups of hanging
trumpets and a drum; but behind them there is darkness. Oblivious
to all the invitations to voyaging and masculine gesturing, the
aproned store-woman, hardly noticeable at first, sits bent over her
sewing in front of the jauntier of the two dummies, while above
the awning the second-story is reassuringly firm and domestic in the
sunlight. Journeyings and rest, the placid and the martial, a calm
explicitness and an evocative chiaroscuro - these are obvious
enough, of course. My chief point, though, is that what the picture
as a whole embodies is the drama of commercial distribution and
consumption, with the eye-catching variety of goods making possible
a variety of important and natural human activities. Viewed in this
light, neither the provenance of those goods nor their transmission
(however 'humble' the trades-person engaged in it) is ignoble. And

25In an admirable brief article that I read after this one was
virtually finished, Mr. Leslie Katz well remarks that Atget "finds
nothing exceptional unnatural. For him deviation is an exposition
of vitality, decay an aspect of fertility, garbage the produce of
consumption; waning is as admirable as waxing, disillusion as
organic as illusion." ("The Art of Eugène Atget", Arts Magazine ,
XXXVI [May-June 1962], p. 35.)

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 ATGET AND THE CITY 2 1 5

the intermingled heroic and pastoral aspects of the commercial

seem to me even more apparent in certain pictures in which 'tradi-
tional' symbols and icons are absent altogether. At least three of
Atget's photographs of food-stuffs on display - respectively
vegetables, poultry, and seafood (V38, Azz; W90; V39) - are
characterized by an energy and drama almost as great as in the
nature pictures I have mentioned. And there are a couple of un-
peopled café pictures, one interior, one exterior (C31, A34), all
radiant with early morning sunshine yet welcoming with coolness
too, which in their calm splendour bring to mind alike the more
lyrical rural panoramas and the loveliest shots of the great formal
gardens. Furthermore, in their structures, materials, and neat rows
of identical forms both places are replete with intimations of the
new technological forces that have produced them, without their
being in the least 'degraded' thereby. And the crisp white lettering
of the names of Bass Extra Stout, Dewar's White Label, and other
delicacies, on the windows of the exterior scene brings me to the
important subject of commercial iconography.

If it is a merit of Pop art to have drawn more attention than

before to such iconography, one of the sadder things about it is the
kind of diminishment that has been too often involved. Just as
amusement arcades, operating-room equipment, airplane cockpits,
the funnies, and so on are generally far more inventive formally
and charged with significance than the art objects whose forms are
derived from them, so advertisements and commercial and industrial
signs have generally much more vitality than the little Pop com-
mentaries on them. (Which is why, no doubt, Pop imagery has
been so effortlessly assimilated back into the undisguisedly commer-
cial.) Of course there are uglinesses, especially in the ghastly
debased-Bauhaus lettering that predominates in the supermarkets,
but in general the ugliness is not so much formal as moral, as in
those appalling paeons to gluttony in the Swift meat ads a few
years back. Even where the clutter of signs and ads lining highways
is concerned, the real objection is not that they make the outskirts
of a city look like Coney Island but that generally the promise of
the blaze of lights and colours is belied by the dreariness of the
stores and used-car lots and the like behind them. The genuine
vulgar energy and variety of Coney Island or of any area with a

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21 6 THE CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY

real night-life going on seems to me wholly good. Where the major

American photographers are concerned, unfortunately, it is only
Walker Evans and Robert Frank who have taken much cognizance
of commercial iconography.2® Frank, of course, learned immensely
from Evans,27 and if it is only an educated guess that the inspiration
for all the brilliant technical 'wrongness' of Frank's work came
from a couple of photographs by the latter, it is a certainty that the
great inspiring force behind Evans's own work was Atget's. In both
cases, however, the indebtednesses are of the thoroughly healthy
kind that involves intelligent transpositions, progressions, and diver-
gences; and in both the emphasis is almost wholly on ironical dis-
crepancies between the promises and affirmations of ads and signs
and the more or less sordid contexts in which they are placed.
With Atget, on the other hand, there is no irony at all so far as
I can see, not even in the picture in which the announcement
" Figaro Populaire " marches in trompe-l'oeil circus-type letter-
ing a foot and a half high across the width of a weather-grimed
little store-front whose doors and windows are covered by blank
and equally grimy-looking shutters (A61). The lettering in that
picture is in fact attractive, as is a good deal of the lettering that
Atget shows.28 Furthermore, the enlivening of the façade reminds
one of the general enlivening and opening up of metaphorical doors
and windows that the newspaper can bring. And the same kind of
affirmativeness characterizes one of the best of the pictures in which
Atget confronts advertising head-on, namely the well-known one of
one of those canopied, advertisement-bearing pillars (" colonnes

2,See Walker Evans, A merican Photographs (New York, 1938), and

Robert Frank, Les Américains (Paris 1958). The two photographs
by Evans that I refer to in the next sentence are to be found on
pp. 28 and 87 of American Photographs.
27Frank himself acknowledges indebtedness to Evans in U.S.
Camera 1958 (New York, 1957), p. 90, but of course it is patent in
his work itself. I have been told that he studied formally under
Alexey Brodovitch. However, the technical 'wrongness' of Brodo-
vitch's Ballet; 100 Photographs , text by Edwin Denby (New York,
1945), is very different in form from either Evan's or Frank's.
"There are still a good many store-fronts in France that are pure
Atget; they are almost invariably better designed than the ones that
have gone 'modern' - i.e., debased-Bauhaus - in their lettering.

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 ATGET AND THE CITY 217

d'affichage" is the technical term for them) that are as indigenous

to the Paris sidewalks as the pissoirs (V41, A29). Though it is
the pillar that catches one's eye most immediately, everything in the
picture in fact interacts in Atgeťs customary way. The posing of the
pillar against a background of trees and a corner of a decorously
baroque church works the reverse of ironically. Sunlight falling
through leafy branches dapples the pillar in a fashion recalling the
naturally dappled trunks of sidewalk plane-trees; energized by lens
distortion, the mingled spots of shadow and sun on the sidewalk
seem to be streaming forwards from a centre located a few yards
behind it; the leafy minglings of light and coolness rising up behind
it seem to be in motion too; and even the church, tilted slightly
inwards by camera distortion and counterbalancing the inward tilt
of the trees on the other side of the picture, isn't sharply separated
from the general harmoniousness and rather gay vitality. Hence the
kinds of energies pointed to by the massed advertisements on the
pillar for concerts, plays, and the Folies Bergères emerge here as
complementary, not antagonistic, to the mingled energies and
calms of the trees, the sunlight, and the church.29
Great literature has been described by Ezra Pound as "language
charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree."30 Georges
Franju, talking about his own movies, has remarked that a shot
should have a content the way a glass does ('7/ doit avoir un con-
tenu comme un verre").31 Let me close this section by examining
one of Atgeťs greatest 'commercial' pictures, in which everything
seems to be functioning to an unusually charged extent even for
him (A6). I must apologize for the length of the analysis, but the
picture, as well as being a complex one, is relevant to my next
section too.

The picture is of part of an intersection in the rain. To the right,

"See also in this connection the superb picture of trees, a pissoir,

and advertisement-covered walls in Camera (December 1966), p. 57.
So far as I know, the picture had never been reproduced earlier.
This is one of the surprises that I referred to at the outset of this
paper. The other is the photograph of the urn. Both, it seems worth
noting, came from private collections - respectively those of M. Yvan
Christ and M. André Jammes.
#0 Polite Essays (London, 1937), P- 1^7-

""Entretien avec Georges Franju", Positif , 25-26 (1957), P* *8-

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2I8 THE CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY

occupying almost the full height of the frame, are three stories of a
mildly elegant façade. The lower story is occupied by a small, gleam-
ing café, its entrance faced on either side with marble panels; the
windows of the stories above it are shut tight behind wrought-iron
balustrades and covered by neat lace curtains. On the left of the
picture is the corner of another block, again with a café on the side
directly facing us, but the block is more pejoratively commercial
than the other one. The stories above the café are occupied by what
looks like a cheap hotel; the side of the block that recedes from us
along the cross-street is occupied by two or three tiny one-story
stores displaying goods indistinctly under awnings; and rising up
behind the stores is a high windowless wall. The roadway is cobbled
and glistening, with the tracks of vehicles curving around the
corner. Because of the camera angle, the gap between the two blocks
is small - small enough, in fact, to be spanned by the cross-piece of
a wrought-iron lamp-standard standing against the corner of the
right-hand block. Below the lamp itself the baroque doorway of a
church is visible in the distance; above the lamp the upper part of
the church fades away into the rain-whitened sky. Across the façade
of the hotel on the left are the words " de la Montagne "; below,
the words "Liqueurs, Café , Bière" run the full width of the café in
elegant lettering; above the entrance of the café on the right are the
words "Au Champion du Café". On the windowless wall, immediately
above the little stores, is a large, clear, painted sign advertising a
paint-and-interior-decoration shop; and above that the rest of the
wall is covered by a farrago of disintegrated painted signs out of
which one word stands out - "Argent". The name on the street sign
beside the lamp-post is "Rue de l'Ecole Polytechnique".
Well, faced with the whole fascinating intermingling here of
embodiments or reminders of rest, transportation, nourishment,
technology, religion, art (of a sort), education, competition, money,
and nature, one is tempted to say that if there were only a tree there
one could ask for nothing more; yet that would be to miss the
peculiar quality of the picture. The scene is wholly urban without
a single organic shape in it, yet it is eye-catchingly rich and varied in
its textures and local forms, quite apart from its almost heart-
breakingly impeccable composition. And when one starts to analyze
that immediate impact one realizes how indispensable to its per-
vasive air of aliveness are those least 'natural' of things, the letters
on the façades, alike as information-givers, as gracefully made
shapes, and as almost wholly abstract patterns on the blank wall

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 ATGET AND THE CITY 2 I9

testifying, along with the rain, to the operations of nature. Further-

more, in their 'artificiality', which is at the same time replete with
humanity, they link up symbolically with the brilliantly placed
street-lamp dead in the centre of the picture. Wholly modern in
form, and wholly the product of modern technology, there yet
seems nothing incongruous in its receiving equal prominence both
with the entrance to the church and with the cold, white, natural
light of the sky. It is the product of a system as complex as the
first and it fills the same basic needs as the second. This is not to
say that it and what it embodies are more important than they are.
Simply, like the rest of the scene and like the other urban scenes
that I have discussed, it has its own kind of dignity.

VI

This brings me finally to Atgeťs handling of people. If I have

lingered over the street-corner picture, this is partly because in it a
certain stiffness of line, sharpness of detail, and explicitness of form
predominate in the buildings and are emphasized by the sym-
metrical composition and the evenly distributed light from the
grey sky. The picture, as I have said, is replete with life, but it is
obvious that this sort of urban scene, stripped of certain elements,
could become oppressive and anti-human, and a number of Atgeťs
pictures of people or their surrogates seem to touch on this pos-
sibility. It is especially tempting to take a tip from those haunting
images of store-mannequins that caught the eyes of the Surrealists
and were among the earliest of Atgeťs works to be reproduced.
There is, for instance, the famous single figure displaying work-
clothes between cases of cheap shirts and dental items (As 6) -
headless, handless, its sleeves hanging down limply, its feet mere
shiny black wood and turned in upon each other in a slightly
crippled-looking way, its waist cinched in tight by a very wide
leather and canvas belt faintly reminiscent of strait-jackets, its
neck circled incongruously by a stiff collar. Or there is the equally
well-known one of the better-class store window in which three
impeccably dressed male mannequins in the upper half of the
picture have been dissolved among the reflections on the window
into little more than disturbingly individual faces (hopeful, sly,
pensive), while below and in front of them bulk, successively, a
much more solid headless figure and a row of neatly draped and
labelled striped trousers running the width of the picture (W14,

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220 THE CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY

A79, C28). Or there are the slightly inane bewigged female faces lost
among the shadows and reflections in the window of a ladies' hair-
dresser, or the menacing row of headless, white-jacketed figures,
with a headless waiter in the centre, massed against the spectator,
or the rigidly corsetted hour-glass-shaped busts in another well-
known picture (respectively, V51 and A80; V27 and A77; V49, A76,
and C29). In other words, there would seem to be intimations
enough in Atgeťs work of the fact that 'heroic' city formalism and
artificiality, if they enlarge existence in some ways, can also lead to
their own kinds of entrapment, constriction, and dehumanization.
And where photographs of actual people are concerned, the ones
of prostitutes would seem to contain some especially sharp and
ironical juxtapositions. A gleaming handsome house-front, its
lower-story windows all leaded stained-glass squares, its street
number enormous between the two upper-story windows, runs
the whole width of a frame, and it is only after a minute or two
that the mind registers that the small white figure in the doorway
to the far left is wearing a thigh-high white dress and little-girl
white socks, that she is in fact no little girl at all, and that another
woman, who is probably the madam, is leaning casually on the
balustrade of the window above her (W123, A63). In another picture
an elegantly dressed woman sits meditatively on a chair in a corner
of a slum courtyard; heavy flagstones are under foot, the doorway to
her left in the grimy walls is black and sinister, bars stand in front of
the tiny glimpse of sky in the extreme top left corner (W124, A6s,
C37). In a third, and one of Atgeťs finest, the juxtaposition of
elegance and the tarnished is reversed again (V110, C39). The fifteen
feet or so of windowless façade that occupies most of the frame
consists of dark, massive, classical wooden panelling, with a portico
over the high central doorway; the curbstones and cobblestones that
occupy the rest of the frame are massive too, the overall impression
of strength in the things in the picture being intensified by the
sharp oblique sunlight and a considerable lens distortion; and posed
in the middle of the doorway is the only object with soft outlines,
the slightly diffident figure of a prostitute in knee-high white dress
and worn-looking boots over little-girl socks. Her hair is frizzled,
her mouth seems painted askew, her nose (but this may be a distort-
ing effect of the sunlight) looks as if it had been broken and
slightly flattened, a worn-looking fox fur hangs round her neck,

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 ATGET AND THE CITY 22 1

its strangely animated head resting on her forearm. This is the

picture to which Atget gave the expressive title "Versailles".32
Yet it is still the balancing of forces that must be insisted on.
Miss Abbott seems to me quite right when she says that "the
material presentment of life so entranced [Atget] that he did not
enter into satire or social criticism. He had a task large enough to
re-create the whole visual world of Paris in photographs."33 And in
his treatment of people Atget seems to me no more a social critic
than was Rembrandt. Even where the pictures that I have described
are concerned, there are other elements that must not be overlooked.
In the picture of the gentleman-mannequins, for instance, its
peculiar richness and fascination derive from the dominant sense of
life in it. If there are solid and rather inhuman-looking trousers at
the bottom of the frame, at the top and overlaying the mannequins
are the hardly less solid-looking reflections of the sky, a tree, a street
front dominated by a neo-classical building; and if two of the faces
have the kind of slightly suspect, smiling painted animation of
early igao's movie heroes, the third, turned away from them, is
sensitive, meditative, wholly natural and individual. Again, in the
corset picture a corset on a bust hanging in the doorway (animated
associatively by a blurred garment swinging free below it that in
fact sets the key of the whole picture) opens downwards like the bell
of a strange flower, while empty corsets in a row at the bottom of
the window are spread out like seaweed or polyps, and tightly
folded ones in the window to the left of the doorway seem strange
abstract shapes carved in wood or plaster. And in this strange
world of metamorphoses, its strangeness intensified by the blackness
out of which these forms emerge, there is even a sort of dignity in
the poised central bust, while three tiny photographs of fashionable
ladies in the window recall that the elegance aspired to is not
necessarily the less real because of the grotesqueness of the means
used to attain it. Again, where the series of prostitutes is con-
cerned, two more pictures should be mentioned (respectively C37,
V93 ).34 One is of a couple of figures posed causally in a doorway, he

"Leroy, p. 8.
"Abbott, "Atget; Forerunner" (November), p. 76.
"The series, it can be added here, was apparently commissioned
to illustrate a book on prostitution by the painter André Digni-
mont. So far as I have been able to discover, the book never
appeared.

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222 THE CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY

a youngish soldier in undress uniform and cap, legs comfortably

crossed, hand on hip, face moustached and good-humoured, she
in a short, white, simple house-dress, the door slightly ajar behind
her, a faintly diffident half-smile on her youngish-looking, unmade-
up face. They are completely real and individual beings, posing for
the camera in the course of a normal relationship. So are the three
handsome, dark-haired, middle-aged 'girls' in the second of the two
pictures, posed in a doorway in a comfortably neighbourly fashion
like three housewives who have been visiting each other. And even
the other prostitutes and/or madams that I have mentioned have
likewise posed for Atget and been taken in a way that enables them
to be there simply as individuals, not 'types', viewed without
indignation, contempt, sentimentality, or fuss of any kind.
And the same disinterested respect for identities informs Atget s
better-known pictures of individuals in more reputable trades. Great
portraiture, whether formal or informal, is almost certainly no
easier in photography than it is in painting (the genre seems to
me to be to photography what drawing is to the other graphic arts,
namely the form in which faking is least easy), and one of the
glories of the art is that it has given us the finest portraits of
Mathew Brady, Julia Margaret Cameron, Paul Strand, Alfred
Stieglitz, Walker Evans, Berenice Abbott,35 Dorothea Lange, Henri
Cartier-Bresson, and others. But there would seem to be special
temptations for the photographer in the way of producing too
obviously controlled a response. Dorothea Lange's individually
moving but collectively all too uniformly decent, careworn, un-
deservedly suffering sharecroppers are obvious examples of this;3*
so, in the opposite direction, are the grainy vacuous monsters of
too many of Frank's pictures. Again, just as Cartier-Bresson when
his genius flags tends to fall into a Family-of-Man cuteness or quaint-
ness or slightly spurious 'warmness', so Strand, in his ruthless
eschewal of precisely that sort of thing, has too often imposed a
glumness on his subjects that is even more irritating because done

"Miss Abbott's own superb portraits of Atget himself must of

course be mentioned at this point.

"See Dorothea Lange and Paul Schuster Taylor, An American

Exodus (New York, 1930).

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 ATGET AND THE CITY 22 3

with such obvious deliberation and conviction.37 With Atget these

kinds of falsification don't occur. His subjects are simply there ,
taken in their professional clothes and for the most part engaged in
the pursuit of their professions, sometimes smiling, sometimes pen-
sive, occasionally a shade odd (like the little umbrella-merchant,
black-coated and hatted in the hot sunlight) or even, like one or two
of the prostitute /madams, a shade sinister. And as far as the main
emphasis goes, these are plainly not people entrapped and distorted
by the city. As Miss Abbott puts it, ''human dignity is expressed
in each and all" of the pictures.38
Two pictures stand out especially in this respect. The first seems
to me one of the unquestionable masterpieces of twentieth-century
art, for all its relative simplicity and immediacy of impact. Heavily
whiskered, middle-aged, expressionless under a shabby hat, a street-
musician stares towards the camera from behind a little street-piano
(W49, V116, Aso, C24). His right hand blurs slightly as he turns
the handle, his lefr hand rests on the other corner of the machine,
and against or on that hand rests the hand of his tiny, long-skirted,
black-scarved singer, who is gazing upwards, head thrown back,
mouth half-open as if in song. Their clothes are heavy-looking,
redolent of dirt and perspiration; the man is not especially pre-
possessing, the woman is almost a midget; the positioning of the
wheels of the piano emphasizes the travelling they do, the oil-cloth
cover on the piano recalls the weathers they face, and the bourgeois
façade behind them is not hospitable. Yet the expression of radiant,
exultant happiness and pride on the woman's face is unequalled
by anything that I can recall in art except the closing shot of
Marlene Dietrich in Sternberg's Scarlet Empress ; and, with the
incongruity in ages, yet manifest closeness of the couple, the picture
seems to me one of the greatest pictorial images of love that we have.
The second picture is even more relevant where the essential pre-
occupations of Atget that I have been trying to trace are concerned
(V79, C25). A working-girl and a youngish street-vendor or porter
are standing talking in a courtyard, taken in profile, he capped
and with a basket strapped on his back, another in his hand, she in

37For the mingled benefits and drawbacks of Strand's approach,

see especially Un Paese , text by Cesare Zavattini (n.p., 1955).
Several of the portraits in it are masterpieces.

38 World of Atget , xix.

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224 THE CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY

an ankle-length long-sleeved black dress with a coarse-looking apron

over it. (A couple of similarly attired older women look on from
the right; it is, one guesses, a brief break from work.) The sunlight
falls intensely on the scene, blotting out with its brightness most
of the lines between the paving stones. The wickerwork of the
basket on the man's back and the side of his head are crisp in the
light, but shadow hides his eyes and a drooping moustache conceals
whatever expression his mouth may have. The girl's face, in con-
trast, is framed against a black doorway in the rear of the courtyard,
and in contrast with her formal-looking dress it is incongruously
youthful. The opportunities for irony are obvious, but they are not
taken. The two figures stand relaxedly, self-confident! y, she a little
taller than him but perfectly poised and very feminine, he very
masculine, the two of them meeting as individuals and equals -
and doing so, obviously, to a considerable extent because of the
city trades whose ostensibly trammelling insignia they wear. It seems
appropriate, too, in view of Atgeťs general emphasis on enlarge-
ment, enrichment, and nourishment in the city, that stretching in
pleasantly flowery, slightly out-of-focus tall letters across the whole
width of the rear wall of the courtyard above the couple's heads is
the word "Dégustation".
VII

Yet distinguished as are Atgeťs portraits, it is not really para-

doxical that his subtlest and richest evocations of individual lives
in the city should come by way of studies of the inanimate; I
mean, of domestic interiors. Such studies are not as common in art
as they deserve to be - indeed, there seem to be few of the first
order to set beside those of Van Gogh and Bonnard - and a special
kind of alertness would seem to be required for them. What has
to be sensed by the artist, I think, is both the peculiar kind of
triumph that the domestic mundane can represent, and also a
larger cultural dimension. As to the latter, I have touched already,
apropos of that much beflowered interior by Atget, on the way in
which a room can be simultaneously an expression of its occupants
and (by way of the artifacts present in it) a revelation of cultural
forces that have helped to make those individuals what they are;
and what an alertness to this sort of thing can result in, we have
the brilliant photographs of Evans in The American People, as well
as Atgeťs own, to remind us. But it is the other aspect that con-
cerns me now, the aspect that is missing altogether from that book

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 ATGET AND THE CITY 22 5

by Evans. When one turns to Atgeťs kitchens and bedrooms and

dining-rooms, it is the moral beauty and blessedness of order that
speaks out in them, however humble the objects or incongruous
the juxtapositions. In Atgeťs presentation of them, a cooking-stove
with an earthenware casserole on it can cohabit perfectly decently
with an ornament-laden mantelpiece above it and a bed adorned
with an elaborate lace coverlet; worn boots and a slop-pail with
the lid off can stand on a shelf under a wooden wash-table and
clothes hang jumbled on top of each other on nearby hooks without
squalor and without any undercutting of the elegantly framed
pictures on the wall; a concatenation of elaborately flowered wall-
paper, a worn brocaded armchair with used clothing on it, a six-
inch tasselled frieze hiding the rim of a knick-knack-covered mantel-
piece, a pair of old boots under the chair, and an alarm clock high
on a shelf, doesn't invite one's amused patronage or wincing away
from a persisting badness of design. In all three of the pictures that
I have just mentioned (respectively Ai 2; A64; W20 and C18) the
elegant or would-be elegant items inspire one rather with a sense of
their loved meaningfulness and life-enriching qualities for the
rooms' inhabitants, the esthetic incongruities keep before one's eyes
the individually made ideals of domestic harmony and security
embodied in those rooms, and the minor untidinesses remind one
both of the human tendencies towards chaos that have in fact been
held in check here and of the fundamental human activities that the
rooms facilitate. And where those activities are concerned, the
lovely chiaroscuro effects in a number of other pictures seem
especially charged with significance. In a picture as lovely as any
of Chardin's, light picks out a basket of loaves and groceries in a
corner, a dresser-top covered with cooking items, and dishes and
folded cloths on a table next to it, in a symbolic juxtaposition of the
raw materials, the means of transformation, and the place of con-
sumption. In another, an elegant bed emerges like an island from a
darkness that fills almost the whole lower half of the frame and
surges part way up the majestically swelling coverlet (the three
mentioned here are, respectively, A4; W19; W91 and A 15). In
another again, a bourgeois dining-table set for one person blazes
out of the semi-darkness and is echoed by a handsome lampshade
overhead, embroidered with heroic figures. The whole complex of
crisply defined wine-bottles and wicker bread-basket and other
'commonplace' items on the table, awaiting whoever will come
through the door in the background, stands there as something

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2S6 THE CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY

which, though transitory and easily disruptible in itself, yet has

behind it a whole powerful structure of values and activities making
possible a civilized decency. And in all of the photographs that I
have mentioned in this paragraph is discernible that mingling of
heroic and pastoral elements that I have tried to elucidate in this
paper. I shall not, however, enlarge on that point. I will simply
suggest that, if I am right about Atgeťs indebtedness to Van Gogh,
it is worth remembering that behind the latter stands the whole Low
Countries tradition of painting, and that in that painting at its
greatest, as in Brueghel and Vermeer and Rembrandt, one sees like-
wise a loving elucidation of the mundane that both brings out its
heroic aspects and permits a harmonious fulfillment of the heroic
aspirations of the artists. And even if I am wrong about the
indebtedness, the parallel still stands.
There is one last picture that I wish to describe, since it can
stand as a summation of so much that I have been saying (W135,
C36). It is of the exterior of a rag-picker's shanty on the outskirts of
Paris, in one of the poorest of all the areas of the city. The shanty
almost certainly consists of only one room, and at its peak can be
scarcely over eight feet high. Junk leans against one side, the walls
are a patchwork of odd-sized planks and bits of canvas, the ground
in front, trodden flat, is stony and barren-looking. A folding chair
of the sort that one finds in the great public gardens stands in front
of the open door, while inside the doorway is discernible a battered,
rustic-looking milk can. To judge from the lighting, the square
aperture in the front wall of the shanty is the only window, and
probably is unglazed. Immediately below that window, however, is
a small window-box, and from the front of that box a number of
strings run up to the wall above the window. A species of vine
climbs up them. Above the level of that window, furthermore, at
least twenty toy animals and dolls, salvaged presumably from some
nearby dump or collected in the course of the owner's daily
scavenging in the city, have been nailed in baroque profusion over
the whole face of the wall. Just below the peak of the roof, too, is
fastened a large stuffed bird, with one of its spread wings pointing
skywards. And on the front edge of the roof itself stand yet more
animals, the uppermost one of which likewise gazes skywards. To
complete the picture, standing on the surprisingly tidy ground
at the corner of the house nearest the camera is a pair of old boots.
The picture as a whole is not remarkable formally, but that is
beside the point - or rather, in a sense it is very much to the

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 ATGET AND THE CITY 227

point. The very fact that the dwelling-place itself has been so evolved
and organized that no special selecting by the camera is required
to bring out its symbolisms makes it an especially valuable - and
moving - epitomization of those basic needs and aspirations that,
in Atget's vision of it, have gone into the making of the city and
that in one form or another continue very properly to seek outlets
there.

VIII

An addendum. There are, it is true, grounds for satisfaction that

photography is still in the kind of limbo that it is with respect to
art as a whole. The humane tradition of craftsmanship, significant
representation, a strong concern with human values, and a general
absence of silly egotism, triviality, opportunism, and faking that
one sees in such diverse artists as Southworth and Hawes, the
Brady team, Cameron, Jacob Riis, Stieglitz, Strand, Weston, Evans,
Eliot Porter, Dorothea Lange, and Cartier-Bresson is still, for-
tunately, the central one in photography; and no-one who cares
deeply for photography, I take it, would welcome seeing the Art
News kind of reviewer laying his hands on it. On the other hand,
it is still regrettably far from a commonplace that photographs are
prints and belong equally with the other forms of prints in galleries
and museums. And an informed and sensitive conflation of the
major photographers with the other significant nineteenth and
twentieth century artists is certainly to be desired, not least because
of the reassessments of some of the latter that might result. (I may as
well say in all seriousness that if I had to choose between saving
the works of Atget and those of Picasso from oblivion, I would
without any hesitation choose Atget's.) Some of the unfortunate con-
sequences of the slighting of photography are particularly obvious
in Atget's case, furthermore, especially in the crucial matter of the
availability of his work. For the layman, it seems safe to say, Atget
is now the Atget of Miss Abbott's World of Atget, Mr. Tettenbergs
Vision of Paris , and the handful of pictures in the Newhall's
Masters of Photography ; and if one wants a reasonably substantial
introduction, each of the first two books has serious drawbacks. Mr.
Trottenberg's misguided notion of yoking Atget to Proust, and his
concern for a nostalgic period charm and prettiness, led him too
often to what was marginal or even boring in Atget's work; and the

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22 8 THE CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY

style of the photographic printing in the book is unintelligent."

But unfortunately Miss Abbott's book is by no means entirely
satisfactory either. The quality of the reproductions must have been
especially heart-breaking to an editor who is herself a superb
craftsman and who has given such unstinted and selfless service
to Atget for forty years. Moreover, it must be said reluctantly that
the selection of photographs in it isn't quite what one had been
hoping for, there being too many items that seem to be there
chiefly to display the range of Atgeťs concerns as a professional
photographer rather than for their intrinsic merit, and that take
up space that could have been occupied by much finer works. Both
books contain a lot of photographs that one can be grateful for.
But neither is as good an introduction to Atget as Miss Abbott's
long-unobtainable Atget, Photographe de Paris.

No, it seems plain that what we still desperately need is a two- or

three-volume edition that will bring together all of Atget's major
works, regardless of whether they have been reproduced before
and of any 'disproportions' that may occur; I mean, if there are
fifty great tree pictures we should have them all. The pictures should
be dated as precisely as possible and should be titled for ease of
reference where Atget himself has failed to do so. They should also
be annotated, since it would often help considerably to know such
things as the precise location of a scene, the dates of buildings, the
degree of poverty or affluence revealed in rooms and façades, and
the significance of costumes and icons. As to format and printing
style, we fortunately now have a model precedent in the special
edition of Camera devoted to Atget. Not only are the full-page
reproductions there as big as one need go with Atget, but the
smaller ones of various sizes, when put in the context of the larger

39As to Mr. Trottenberg's quasi-documentary ambition, an

intelligent anthology of really live photographs from the belle
époque would of course be enormously interesting, as Jean Roman's
Paris Fin de Siècle , trans. James Emmons (New York, i960), and the
1966 number of Camera to which I have already referred demon-
strate. To put one together, however, one would need a consider-
ably more acute critical eye than Mr. Trottenberg displays. It
isn't really a surprise to find Mr. Trottenberg remarking blandly
in his concluding paragraph that "the formal question of whether
photography is an art may never be fully resolved." (p. 38).

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 ATGET AND THE CITY 22 9

ones so that one can expand them with the mind's eye, are quite
large enough and demonstrate how a much fuller selection of Atget's
work could be included in a single volume than has been the case so
far. (As a matter of fact, there really seems no reason why, as a
200-page appendix, we could not have all his pictures, in 35 mm size,
arranged in series.) The choice of pictures in Camera is also first-
rate, and the juxtapositions are very intelligent and illuminating.
As to the photographic printing (the occasional discrepancies, I
take it, are due to the printing of the journal itself) the slightly
brown tone seems exactly right, even though less pronounced than
in Atget's own prints, and so does the balance between 'fine' printing
and an intelligent - and essential - respect for the soaked-up blacks
and burned-up whites in a number of the pictures.40 Such an
edition might need subsidizing by a foundation, but it would
immensely deserve and repay it, since for the first time something
like justice would have been done to one of the greatest twentieth-
century artists. And those of us who know and love Atget already
would not have to piece him together from at least sixteen different
printed sources and even then not be confident that there aren't
pictures still to come that are as great as any by him that we now
have.41

JOHN FRASER

40The subject of photographic printing is a highly complex one,

both technically and esthetically. Atget's pictures, for instance, now
exist for us in at least eight different styles of more or less plausible,
printing - those of the three books that I have referred to, that of
Camera , that of Miss Abbott's portfolio of prints made by herself
from Atget's negatives, that of at least one travelling show, also
made from Atget's negatives, and that (or rather those, for they are
not homogeneous) of the prints made by Atget and his wife. A whole
paper could be written on this subject. I can only affirm here that
of the reproductions that have been published so far, the ones in
Camera seem to me the best.

41I will add that Mr. Katz seems to me absolutely right when he
says that Atget's oeuvre "belongs in a public institution or a major
collection of modern art, where administrative and scholarly care
can be provided by endowment or foundation funds. There should
be an Atget Room in a museum, with a continuous, changing
exhibition." (35)

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«30 THE CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY

APPENDIX

A precise figure for the extant number of pictures by Atget is

impossible to arrive at at present, but the following information
may be of some help.
To start with the best known of the collections of his work, Miss
Abbott has stated in a circular letter that she herself has about
1500 negatives and 8000 prints. So far as I know, however, no-one,
including Miss Abbott, has ever said publicly how many different
pictures there are in the collection. It is tempting to infer from
her "Atget; Forerunner" that the figure might be around «000; she
speaks in that article of there being "many duplicates" in the
collection when she bought it in 1928, and at one point says that,
"Not counting the negatives made for the official archives, [Atget]
made almost two thousand plates which survived his death. Qualita-
tively, this number may not be as impressive as the record of
[Mathew B.] Brady, who is credited with almost eight thousand.
But Brady had helpers, Atget had none" (p. 48). On the other hand,
I have been told that Miss Abbott may well have considerably more
prints than she has negatives for; and the figure for the negatives
in her possession that she gave in the same article was 1700. 1 should
perhaps explain that I have not corresponded with Miss Abbott or
attempted to see her collection myself. Partly I felt that by now she
must be very weary of dealing with enquirers. But also, while
immensely honouring Miss Abbott, as everyone must, for her selfless
devotion to Atget for forty years, I wished to remain completely
free to criticize her work if necessary.
As to other collections, there are about 530 different prints in the
George Eastman House, Rochester, N.Y., and about 60 in the
Museum of Modern Art, New York. The latter are almost all superb;
the cream of the former consists of the 50-odd prints that formerly
belonged to Man Ray. In France, several hundred prints (of which,
on the whole, the best ones have been published by now) are
available to the public in the Bibliothèque Nationale, but I have
been told by what seemed a reliable informant elsewhere that there
are many more that have not yet been catalogued. M. Leroy,
indeed, speaks of there being "thousands" there. M. Leroy also
reports that there are about 3000 at the Musée Carnavalet in Paris
("Atget et son Temps", 37«). Again, there are allegedly many prints
and/or negatives at the Archives de Documentation Photo-
graphiques at the Palais-Royal. There are also prints in private
collections, most notably that of M. Yvan Christ (Leroy, ibid.). The

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 ATGET AND THE CITY 2J1

problem with the French public collections is apparently that the

bulk of the official purchases of Atgeťs work were classified accord-
ing to subject matter, not artist.
Even rudimentary calculations would suggest that the number
of pictures that Atget actually made must have been very large.
True, the years of his most intensive work appear to have been
those from 1898-1914 (M. Martinez suggests plausibly that he
may virtually have ceased work during the War, and curiously few
of his available pictures bear obvious signs of being post-War.)
It seems reasonable, too, to assume that the bulk of his outdoor
work was probably done from May through September. But even if
we then assume very conservatively that he was outdoors working
on only half those days and that he took an average of five pictures
on each of his excursions, this still leaves us with the figure of 6000
negatives simply for his first sixteen years. And in addition one has
to allow for work done in other months (there are leafless trees in a
number of the pictures) and for the post-War years.
Obviously a great deal of research remains to be done.

ATGET BIBLIOGRAPHY

This bibliography is not complete, but I believe it is much the

fullest that has appeared so far. The figures after each item indicate
the number of Atget photographs included. Asterisks indicate the
more important items.
•[Abbott, Berenice, ed.] Atget , Photographe de Paris, pref. Pierre
Mac-Orlan. New York 1930. [96]
*

US. Camera, I (November 1940), pp. 21-23, 48-49, 76; (Decem-

ber 1940), pp. 68-71. [8]

York, 1953. [5]

♦

duction. New York, 1956.

*

[176]
♦Abbottava [Abbott], Berenice, ed. and introd. Eugène Atget.
Prague, 1963. [70]
Becker, Harold. Eugène Atget . Short film. U.S.A., 1963. [Un-
examined]

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2 32 THE CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY

Christ, Yvan. L'Age d'or de la Photographie. Paris, 1965. [8]

*Le Crapouillot [special Paris number], (May 1929). [3 2]

Dean, Nicholas. "Two Recent Books on Atget" [rev. of Vision of

Paris and World of Atget], Contemporary Photographer , V
(Spring 1964-65), pp. 6-8.
"Eugène Atget , Photography 64; An Invitational Exhibition.
Catalog. Rochester, N.Y., 1964, p. 38. [1]
♦"Eugène Atget" [selection], Camera , XLV (December 1966), pp.
57-64. [17]
♦Eugène Atget special issue, Camera , XLI (December 1962). [37]
F., B. "Eugène Atget", Fotografia [Polish], (May 1963), 118-123.
[10]
Gates, E. L. Rev. of Vision of Paris, Aperture , XI, no. 2 (1964)*
75-76-
Gernsheim, Helmut, in collaboration with Alison Gernsheim.
The History of Photography. London, New York, Toronto,
1955- [«i
Gold, Arthur. "The Man with the Golden Eye" [rev. of World of
Atget], Book Week (April 4, 1965), pp. 4, 13. [1]
Greenberg, Clement. "Four Photographers [rev. of Vision of Parts
and other books], N.Y. Review of Books (January 23, 1964),
pp. 8-9.
•Katz, Leslie. "The Art of Eugène Atget", Arts Magazine, XXXVI
(May-June 196a), pp. 38-36. [2]
Kospoth, B. J. "Eugene Atget , Transition, no. 15 (February
1929), pp. 122-124. [2]
•Leroy, Jean. Atget et son Temps , Terre d Images, no. 3 (May-
June 1964), pp. 357-372. [15]
•

issue], XLI (December 1962), pp. 6-8.

•Martinez, R. E. "Eugène Atget in Our Time", Camera, XLV
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 ATGET AND THE CITY 233

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