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THE EARLY PHOTOGRAPHIC WORK OF EUGENE ATGET:

1892-1902

presented by

EUN YOUNG JEONG

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THE EARLY PHOTOGRAPHIC WORK OF EUGENE ATGET: 1892-1902

Eun Young Jeong

A THESIS

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

Department of Art and Art History

2006

ABSTRACT

THE EARLY PHOTOGRAPHIC WORK OF EUGENE ATGET: 1892-1902

By

Eun Young Jeong

This study concerns French photographer Eugene Atget’s early works primarily
made prior to 1902. The purpose of this study is twofold: to provide historical context of
Atget’s work and, based on that context, to examine Atget’s strategic methods to control
the artistic and documentary impulses informing the given works.

First, from the historical context, Atget’s commissioned works belong to the
tradition of French topographical records, which are both aesthetic and documentary in
nature. Particularly, I examine Atget’s relation to photographer Charles Marville.
Marville’s pictorial modes played an important role in shaping Atget’s artistic Parisian
images. Second, Atget’s images refer to the strategic images borrowed from other
mediums such as contemporary painting and traditional print. Serial systems and his use
of perspective led ordinary or traditional images to be perceived differently in the new
visual context. The study also reveals that Atget’s early career as a document producer
played an important role in shaping his early images.

In conclusion, Atget’s work is essentially a synthesis of elemental photographs,
many of which were made in the service of the whole. Aspects of Atget’s works
embraced the historical, the documentary and elements of the pictorial, qualities which

existed through all the chronological periods of Atget’s photography.

Copyright by
EUN YOUNG J EONG
2006

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES ............................................................................... v
INTRODUCTION ................................................................................ 1
CHAPTER 1 ‘
BIOGRAPHY AND EARLY CAREER OF EUGENE ATGET ............................ 5
CHAPTER 2 ‘
HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF EUGENE ATGET’S PHOTOGRAPHS .................. 11
1. Inseparability of ‘Art’ and ‘Document’
in Nineteenth-Century French Photography .......................................... 1 1

2. Atget and the Aesthetics of Early French Topographical Records 22

CHAPTER 3
CHARACTERISTICS OF EARLY PHOTOGRAPHS
1. ‘Documents pour Artists’ .............................................................. 28
2. Seriality and Perspective ................................................................ 36
CONCLUSION ............. 39
ILLUSTRATIONS ................................................................................ 42
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................. 74

iv

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1. Eugene Atget, Painting of Two Trees, before 1913, oil on panel, MoMA, New
York ................................................................................................. 42

Figure 2. L.J.M Daguerre, View of the Boulevard du Temple, 1839, daguerreotype,
Stadtmuseum, Munich ............................................................................ 42

Figure 3. Sigismond Himely, Entrance to the Library, the Louvre, 1843, fiom N. M. P
Lerebours, “Excursions daguerriennes,” 2nd series, 1843, aquatint on mounted china
paper after a daguerreotype, Paris .............................................................. 43

Figure 4. Hippolyte Bayard, Remains of Barricades in Rue Royale, 1849, albumen print,
Sociéte’ Francaise du Photographic, Paris ...................................................... 43

Figure 5. Charles Negre, Le petit chiflonier, 1851, salted paper print from waxed paper
negative, private collection, New York ......................................................... 44

Figure 6. Victor Regnault, (attributed to), Still life on Trestles, printed by Louis De'siré
Blanquart-Evrard in “Etudes photographique,” 1St series, no.17, 1853, Bibliotheque
Municipale, Lille ................................................................................... 44

Figure 7. Charles Marville, The Open Gate, printed by Louis Désire' Blanquart-Evrard in
“Etudes photographique,” 1St series, no. 1 7, 1 853, Bibliotheque Municipale,
Lille .................................................................................................. 45

Figure 8. Henri Le Secq, Block of houses of the Marché-Neuf and the Petit Pont,
Photograph, 1852, Bibliotheque des Arts Décoratifs, Paris .................................. 45

Figure 9. Charles Marville, Francfort, calotype, undated, Bibliotheque Nationale,
Paris .................................................................................................. 46

Figure 10. Charles Marville, Saint Denis, wood engraving from Charles Nodier, “La
Seine et ses bords,” 1836, Paris .................................................................. 46

Figure 11. Alexandre-Evaruste Fragonard, Fragments, Large Church of the Abbey of
Saint Wandrille, 1820, from Baron Isidore Taylor, Charles Nodier and Alphonse de
Cailleux “Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’Ancienne France,” vol.1, Ancienne
Normandie, Paris, 1820, pl.24, lithograph in black ink, graduated tint stone, by Godefroy
Engelmann after drawing by A. E Fragonard, Paris .......................................... 47

Figure 12. Gustave Le Gray, The Covered Allée at Bagnewc in Anjou, 1851, modern print
from original paper negative, Musée d’Orsay (on loan from the Archives Photographique
du Patn'monie), Paris .............................................................................. 48

Figure 13. Henri Le Secq, Chartres, c.1851 photolithograph on stone by Lemercier, from
original paper negative by Le Secq, Bibliotheque Nationale, Pan's ......................... 48

Figure 14. Eugene Atget, Ancien College du Chance, 12 rue de Biévre, fondé en 1343 par
Guillaume de Chanac, Evéqye de Paris, 1900, albumen print, MoMA, New
York ................................................................................................. 49

Figure 15. Eugene Atget, Lampshade seller, albumen print, 1899-1900, Musée
Camavalet, Paris ................................................................................... 50

Figure 16. Vert, Balayeuse, Place de l’Ho‘tel-de— Ville, c.1906, in “Dans les rues de Paris,”
Paris .................................................................................................. 51

Figure 17. Charles Marville, Maison de la rue de la Tannerie a Abbeville, habitée par
Francois 1 er en 1540, printed by Louis-Desire Blanquart-Evrard in “Variétés
photographiques,” 1851-55, collection Macqueron, Bibliotheque Municipale,
Abbeville ............................................................................................ 52

Figure 18. Eugene Atget, Maison a Abbeville, before 1900, albumen silver print, MoMA,
New York ........................................................................................... 52

Figure 19. Charles Marville, no.110, Rue Estienne, 1865, calotype, Bibliotheque
' Administrative de la Ville de Paris, Paris ...................................................... 53

vi

Figure 20. Eugene Atget, St. Etienne du Mont rue de la Montagne, Saint Genevieve, 5
arr., 1898, albumen silver print, Bibliotheque Administrative de la Ville de Paris,
Paris .................................................................................................. 54

Figure 21. Unknown Photographer, untitled, undated, New York .......................... 55

Figure 22. Eugene Atget, Villejuif ancient chdteau des comtes de Saint-Roman, 1901,
albumen silver print, MoMA, New York ........................................................ 55

Figure 23. Eugene Atget, The Old School of medicine, rue de la Bucherie, 1898, albumen
silver print, MoMA, New York .................................................................. 56

Figure 24. Gustave Caillebotte, Rue de Paris: Temps de Pluie, 1877, oil on canvas, Petit-
Gennevilliers, Paris ................................................................................ 56

Figure 25. Gustave Caillebotte, F [cor-Scrapers, 1875, oil on canvas, Paris ............... 57

Figure 26. Eugene Atget, Bitumiers, 1899-1900, albumen silver print, MoMA, New
York .................................................................................................. 57

Figure 27. Eugene Atget, Porte d ’Arceuil Boulevard Jourdan, undated, albumen Silver
Print, Paris ........................................................................................... 58

Figure 28. Gustave Caillebotte, The Park on the Caillebotte pr0perty at Yerres, 1875, oil
on canvas, Paris ..................................................................................... 58

Figure 29. Eugene Atget, Abbeville (Chemin), before 1900, albumen silver print, MoMA,
New York ........................................................................................... 59

Figure 30. Eugene Atget, Abbeville, before 1900, albumen silver print, MoMA, New
York .................................................................................................. 59

Figure 31. Alfred Sisley, Avenue of Chestnut Trees at La Celle-Saint Cloud, 1867, oil on
canvas, Paris ......................................................................................... 60

vii

Figure 32. Montgeroult, Val d ’Oise, c.1935, John Rewald Library Collection, Archives of
the National Gallery of Art, Washigton, D.C ................................................... 61

Figure 33. Paul Cézanne, Turning Road at Montgeroult, 1898, oil on canvas, MoMA,
New York ........................................................................................... 61

Figure 34. Eugene Atget, Pontoise, place du Grand-Martroy, 1902, albumen silver print,
MoMA, New York ................................................................................. 62

Figure 35. Ando Hiroshige, Nighttime in Saruwakacho, from “One hundred Views of
Famous Places in Edo,” 1857, color woodblock print ......................................... 62

Figure 36. Eugene Atget, La Rochelle, 1896?, albumen silver print, MoMA, New
York .................................................................................................. 63

Figure 37. Robert Demachy, Landscape, c.1904, gum-dichromate print, Musée D’orsay,
Paris .................................................................................................. 63

Figure 38. Eugene Atget, Organ Grinder and Street Singers, 1898—99, albumen silver
print, MoMA, New York .......................................................................... 64

Figure 39. Eugene Atget, Street Vendor, 1899, albumen silver print, MoMA, New
York .................................................................................................. 65

Figure 40. Eugene Atget, Passage Vandrezanne, Butte-aux-Cailles, September 1900,
albumen silver print, MoMA, New York ....................................................... 66

viii

Introduction

From around 1898 until 1927, French photographer Eugene Atget made
approximately 8,000 to 10,000 photographs of the city of Paris and its environs. It is
considered the most comprehensive and vivid portrait of a city ever made.1 Atget’s
influences on later generations of photographers were significant, and Atget’s preeminent
position in the history of photography seemed to be securely established.2 Such a well
developed body of criticism and study on Atget, however, has tended to overshadow the
importance of Atget’s early works—significant not only for an understanding of Atget’s
future artistic development, but also to more thoroughly understand the evolution of 19th
century French photography. This study will examine Atget’s works primarily made prior
to 1902.

In the beginning of the study, some fundamental questions should be answered to
assess Atget’s early work properly and its place in his time. First, in what context did
Atget start to take his photographs, and should we be conscious about a photographer’s
artistic training and the process of artistic awareness, which has been studied to
understand the motives of painters and sculptors? Next, can we evaluate his work in the
context of the artistic accomplishment of his contemporaries? The latter question can be
approached properly only after we have considered the former.

After viewing a 1981 exhibition of Atget’s photographs at the Museum of Modern

Art, Gene Thornton wrote:

In France this early twentieth-century photographer is regarded as the last (but
by no means the greatest) of a long line of architectural photographers that
includes such nineteenth-century masters as Henri Le Secq, Gustave Le Gray

and Edouard-Denis Baldus. In America, however, Atget is regarded as the

Cezanne of Modern photography, the first and perhaps the greatest of the

modern school, and he was presented at the Modem with all the panoply of

scholarship that such a high rank deserves.3

Thomton’s statement does not fully explain Atget’s photographs, but he correctly
suggests the way in which Atget is considered: in the context of nineteenth-century
French photographic tradition. In fact, Atget’s work belongs to the aesthetic tradition of
early documentary photography, particularly early French topographical recordings. At
this point, it is difficult to discuss Atget’s work without consideration the work of Charles
Marvill whose influence on Atget can already be detected before 1900. Marville’s artistic
approach to Parisian streets and architectures seems to have had significant effect on
Atget’ photographic style. Clearly, in this period, Atget searched for relevant artistic
traditions on which to build his photographic career.

Indeed, Atget’s photographs of this period are seen as the product of a search. The
pictures show the visual affinities which link his distinctive pictorial approach to other
artistic mediums, particularly contemporary paintings. Some pictures, especially
landscapes, point to a critical phase in his artistic career, in which Atget’s style began to
overcome simple topographical objectivity and be distinguished from other
photographers. Unlike other contemporary topographic images which rarely go beyond
their informational contents, Atget’s pictures appear that the picturesque and the
documentary are in tension with each other, and are combined together to create more
concentrated visual effects.

It is the contention of this thesis that Atget’s photographs belong to the French

topographic landscape tradition, which has a dual nature: they are both documentary and

artistic.4 In his letter to Paul Léon, director of Fine Arts, Atget described his awareness of

its artistic and historical value to an archive. Atget stated:

This enormous artistic and documentary collection is now completed. I can

say that I possess all of Old Paris...

The purpose of this study is twofold: 1) to provide a historical context for Atget’s
early work and 2) to use that context to examine Atget’s strategic methods to control the
artistic and documentary impulses informing the given works. As I stated earlier, Atget’s
early works that have been often overlooked by scholars already demonstrate all of
Atget’s most important and consistent photographic features.5 Particularly I chose 1902
as the outside temporal boundary for this study because afler that year Atget’s style
remains stable.

In the first chapter, I will outline Atget’s biography briefly and mention some
significant aspects of his early photographic career, which influenced his later
photographic style. Next, I will examine the early genre photography in Paris and related
photographic criticism, which reveals the inseparability of ‘document’ and ‘art’ in early
nineteenth-century French topographic photography. Then I will argue that Atget’s
commissioned works belong to the tradition of French topographical records, which are
both aesthetic and documentary in nature. Particularly, I will examine Atget’s relation to
photographer Charles Marville. Marville’s pictorial modes played an important role in
shaping Atget’s Parisian images. Probing the reason and history behind the
photographer’s taste for such imagery will be the primary content of the second chapter

of this paper.

In the third chapter, I will examine three distinct but related characteristics that
distinguish Atget’s photographs from those of his contemporaries. First, from around
1900, he intentionally put to use compositional permutations inherent in spaces, which
was seen in some French painting of the time. Particularly, the application of new
compositional formulae in early photographs reflects Atget’s awareness of pictorial
space. It was likely that Atget’s early occupation as a document producer for artists
provided him the opportunities of artistic training and he responded contemporary trends
in painting. In her study on Atget, Molly Nesbit claims: “Atget’s photographs shared a
superficial resemblance to contemporary painting, but their relation to Modernism was
tangential and can only be argued by recourse to the document.”6 While I partially agree
with Nesbit’s point regarding a superficial relationship between Atget’s formalistic style
and Modernism, I will argue that his early images have visual properties that parallel
contemporary painting, and theses pictorial choices had a lasting effect on his entire
work.

Atget’s work is structured by a system of distinct series, which reflects Atget’s
specific intentions in picture making. The use of perspective leads ordinary or traditional
images to be perceived differently in the new visual context. His use of sequence and
perspective will be considered in the last chapter of this study.

Atget’s early work which emerged from the artistic and historical context of his
day provides an instructive precedent for the photographs that follow. No matter what he
produced after 1902, its origins can be traced to his earlier work. Through this essay, we
will gain valuable insight into Atget’s early variety of explorations that formed the

background and framework for his successful photographic productions.

CHAPTER 1

BIOGRAPHY AND EARLY CAREER OF EUGENE ATGET

Very little is known about Atget’s early life.7 He kept no diary or other personal
records.8 The information that has been published has become somewhat mythological
due to a lack of primary source material. The biographical material presented here is
taken from three major biographies of Atget as well as from the memories of André
Calmettes, his lifelong friend.’

Scholars widely agree that Atget was born in Liboume, near Bordeaux, in 1857.
Both his parents died when he was young, and his maternal grandparents in Bordeaux
raised him.10

We also know very little about Atget’s formal education.ll We do know that as a
young man, Atget was employed as a sailor.12 After several voyages, Atget decided to
pursue a career as an actor, and he moved to Paris in 1878 to apply to the Conservatoire
Nationale de Musique et de De'clamation, the country’s foremost acting school.13

The Consevatoire was the only institution of its kind in France. Entrance was
fiercely competitive, and aspirants prepared for their eventual education there with many
years of preliminary study and private tutelage.l4 Some uncertainty surrounds the
beginning of Atget’s acting career since there is no record of any dramatic education or
experience before. Atget’s physical appearance, according to Maria Morris, did not fit the

“dramatic style.”

He had not been blessed with the noble features and statuesque physique of a
leading man. He was short (about 5 feet 5 inches), rather squarely built, and
had dark hair and small grey eyes. With a prominent nose, strong cleft chin,
long upper lip, and straight, severe mouth, his was not a handsome face for
glamorous roles; the features were too large and discordant, and they were
ruled by a contracted intensity of will.15

Atget was drafted into the military in 1878. During this period he was working as
well as attending a conservatory.'6 Atget’s decision to study there, despite the above
facts, suggests his strong ambition and determination to be an actor. The result of his first
examination also reflects his commitment to acting. His instructor Edmond Got described

Atget’s performance: ‘intelligent, and with a really bizarre, serious way of playing

comedy. ..’ 17

Atget continued to split his time between soldering and acting, but according to

Maria Morris, his military obligations prevented him from keeping up with his studies

1.18

and he was expelled from school in 188 Discharged from the military in 1882, he

spent the remainder of the decade touring the provinces with itinerant acting troupes. This
period in his life is not well documented. Andre Calmettes, who met Atget during this

time, described the period this way:

. . .I was to meet Atget, in Paris, when he was no longer a sailor but an actor.
After having appeared in the provincial theaters, Atget played dramatic roles
in the suburbs of Paris: as he had rather hard features, he was given
unflattering roles—called “third roles.” Such was his profession for a certain
number of years, and it was during that time that he met the woman who was
to become his “amie,” who lived with him until her death a year before his
own. Soon the theatre offered them fewer and fewer resources so that Atget
and his companion established themselves in Paris, where his small savings
were soon gone, and he was obliged to look for another occupation.19

Some scholars suggest that Atget’s romanticism reflected in his works appears to
originate in this early experience as an actor.20 For example, Colin Westerbeck and Joel
Meyerowitz claim that Atget’s romantic penchant may have developed under the
influence of the Romantic Comedies he was involved in until he was forty years old. For
these scholars, Atget’s romantic penchant is one of the key artistic elements of his
photographs. Andrew Szegedy-Maszak also believes there is a relationship between
Atget’s acting career and his photography. Szegedy-Maszak’s reasoning behind his
conclusion that Ategt’s photography reflects his acting career comes from his observation
that Atget’s street scenes and his interior views share characteristics with theatrical sets.
According to Szegedy-Maszak, the scenes captured in Atget’s photographs “become
stage sets that await the animating presence of the actors.”21

Despite the shared visual characteristics of theatres and Atget’s photographs, it is
difficult to claim that the origin of Atget’s romanticism lay in his acting experience. At
the time that Atget was acting, French theater was not particularly romantic. We cannot
be sure that Westerbeck and Meyerowitz were correct in their assumptions that Atget
played in Romantic Comedies since French theater was then a process of transition away
from Romanticism and toward Realism.22 It seems more likely that Atget was
predisposed to a Romantic penchant as his early decision to be an actor suggests, that he
retained his taste for the theater after he ended his acting career. He referred to himself as
a ‘dramatic artist’ until 1912, the year he took up the designation of ‘author-publisher of a
photographic anthology of Old Paris.’23 From 1904 to 1913 he gave lectures on the
theater in the popular universities, at the House of the People, the Socialist Cooperative,

and the School Sciences.24

Around 1888, Atget suddenly converted from actor to photographer. We do not
know how, when or where Atget learned to make photographs. James Borcoman thinks
that two particular events that occurred at the beginning of Atget’s stay in Paris had a
major impact on him. The first was the Exposition Universelle of 1878 and the second, a
series of free public lectures on photography.25 Atget’s attendance at either of these
events is undocumented, so it is difficult to prove an impact on Atget or to use these
events to explain his sudden change of vocation.

According to André Calmette, Atget made several attempts to be a painter before he
turned to photography.26 “We had,” Calmette reminisced, “both of us, a great interest in
painting and we knew many painters.”27 Contradicting this memory, Maria Morris, citing
the interview with Valentine Compagnon, Atget’s mistress, claimed that Atget’s interest
in painting was not preliminary to his interest in photography, but was concurrent with
it.28 The only Atget painting known today is of trees (figure 1). Considering Morris’s
descriptions, all four paintings demonstrate different techniques.29 She goes on to suggest
that his painting grew alongside his photography of trees as part of an ongoing
investigation of forms and their pictorial representation.3O We have no way of knowing if
Atget wanted to be a professional painter before he became a photographer, but it is
important to note that he began his photographic career within the context of his interest
in painting.

Around 1890-91, Atget opened a studio, ‘Documents pour artists, ’ at 31 Rue
Campagne Premiere and became a commercial photographer for artists.31 According to

Maria Morris, Atget took most of his photographs on his own initiative. His business was

based on photographing subjects with broad appeal and on selling the individual prints
himself.32

At this point it will be helpful to understand Atget’s work by examining the
equipment and techniques that he used. After visiting Atget’s darkroom, Berenice Abbott

described his equipment.

His equipment consisted of a simple 18x 24 cm view camera, with almost
none of the present-day adjustments... Atget used glass plates. They were
‘plaque au gelatine-bromure d’argent’ made by the Brothers Lumiere. .. The
box was marked ‘extra rapides,’ but actually the emulsion must have been
fairly slow... As for accessories, he certainly did not use an exposure meter.
At most, he made use of a simple coefficient table with mathematical
calculations. But it is more likely that he judged exposure by his vast
experience with light conditions, subject matter, and type of plate emulsion.
His negatives seem (extremely dense, which suited) the gold (toned) chloride
paper of his time. Because the emulsion was non-color sensitive, he never
used filters... Atget made a practice of closing down (the lens) to a very small
aperture, he told me, and giving long exposures. Probably this was to 064.
Only when he photographed people in the series called ‘Petits Métiers’ and
‘Scenes de la Rue’ did he open up the diaphragm and focus critically on the
center of interest, leaving the background out of focus.33

Atget never abandoned his first equipment, carrying it all over Paris and its suburbs.
The technique for making negatives and prints that Atget initially used remained constant
throughout his life.34

Regarding early clients who hired Atget for the purpose of documenting images to
use as reference for paintings, only four painters are known.35 Without further
information, Atget’s relationships with his clients and whether or not his pictures affected
their work is hard to assess.

In 1897, Atget also participated in an enterprise to preserve images of le vieux Paris

set by the Commission des Monuments Historiques in 1889. He sold one hundred

photographs of Old Paris to the institution and he worked as a specialist of the type. We
don’t know the way in which he acquired the public commission, but it is clear that this
incident provided Atget a critical impetus for developing his photographic career.

Atget’s business came to a virtual halt during World War I, but he managed to
continue his practice after the war. After the death of his mistress in 1926, Atget
produced very little work. Weakened by a spartan diet that consisted exclusively of
bread, milk and sugar, he died in 1927 at the age of seventy.36

The amount of factual information we have about each period in Atget’s life varies
and the facts we do have do not equally illuminate all aspects of his character. However,
we do know that Atget’s early photographic career defined his specific interests and
needs, and it determined the direction of his future career. During the remaining years of
his life, these experiences would serve him well: no matter what he produced after 1902,
its origin can be traced—both stylistically and iconographically-to his early work. In the

next chapter, we will see how he used this background in his early photographic works.

10

CHAPTER 2

HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF ATGET’S PHOTOGRAPHS

1. Inseparability of ‘Art’ and ‘Document’ in Nineteenth-Century French Photography

As discussed in the previous chapter, Atget rarely commented about his work.
Understandably, many scholars give the first priority to the ‘documentary’ in assessing
Atget’s early photographs since Atget called these pictures ‘documents.’37 However, due
to the difficulties of defining nineteenth-century ‘documentary’ practice, the issues
regarding the boundaries between ‘art’ and ‘document’ have often been raised among art
historians.38 This situation has led some to take extreme positions on the matter. The most

notable example is Molly Nesbit’s where she writes:

When Atget called his pictures documents he was explaining that they

circulated in the closed channels of painter’s cartoons, decorators’ folios, and

libraries’ files, where individual pictures counted for little and the quality of

the file was measured by its quantity and breadth of coverage.39

Nesbit draws sharp distinctions between ‘document’ and ‘art,’ associating
photography with information rather than with aesthetic practice. In the same context,
given an emphasis on the informative and the more neutral attitude of documentary

practice, she draws a distinction between the works of the document producer such as

Atget and that of the artist. She makes the following claim:

11

Atget persistently kept to his documents and kept his pictures moving along a

specific layer of the cultural zone, not the public exhibition of Salon painters

and galleries but the field of the archive and the printed page.40

In Nesbit’s opinion, photographic ‘archives’ are no more than information, and
Atget fundamentally depended on the governing economic circumstances of public
archival practice. Even though Nesbit paid careful attention to the actual circumstances of
photographic production of the time, it seems that she suppressed Atget’s puzzling
pictorial choices that reflect his historical and artistic awareness of the subject. Atget’s
pictures clearly indicate that he faithfully followed pictorial habits of some older
photographers: the enclosed atmosphere of old streets becomes a central element of
emotional expression. And the light becomes a form of highlight around which
everything except the central building is in deep shadow.

Nesbit’s perspective raises at least two fundamental questions in classifying
photography specifically applying to early nineteenth-century French photographs. First
of all, she seems to believe that the nature of documentary photography inhibits its place
within the category of photographic ‘art.’“ In this case, we have to ask whether we could
say the same about the aesthetic mode of older French photographs which were
characterized both by topographical objectivity and strong feeling of personal expression.
Secondly, we should ask if there is a borderline between photographers’ finest
‘document’ and photographic ‘art,’ what agents were necessary for the consideration of
photography as ‘art’ or vice versa, and whether these agents really existed among
nineteenth-century photographic practices and criticism.42 From a historical perspective,
nineteenth-century French photography was considered a constructing process of the new

medium’s artistic legitimacy rather than the denial of photography as art. Particularly

12

during the period of urban renewal in Paris, photographers who focused on specific
subject matter such as cityscapes or topographic views tended to re-introduce an element
of the picturesque into their works. Therefore their photographs achieved their most
compelling visual expressions.43 It was unlikely that early photographers were
aesthetically naive or overtly documentary. Many early photographers were equipped
with the crucial understanding of the consciousness of photography based on its unique
‘double destiny’: ‘documentary’ and ‘art.’

To consider Atget’s photographs more in this context requires a brief historical
review of the early genre of the photography of Paris and a close examination of early
photographic criticism between the 18403 and 18603. The reason I focus on this earlier
photographic criticism is based on two facts. First, this was the period between the
invention of the daguerreotype in 1839 and the 1860’s that the debate over photography’s
claim to artistic legitimacy was most active. Interestingly, the dichotomy between ‘art’
and ‘document’ was seen in older criticism.44 But such a distinction is an artificial
polarity, for in fact the function and style of most photographs was intertwined during the
mid nineteenth-century. As Nancy Keeler explains, any photograph records impartially
the fragment of the visual world and conversely, any documentary photograph by nature
conforms to a certain notion of pictorial order.45 For example, many artistic-minded
photographers applied compositional concerns drawn from traditional arts to
photography. Second, within this context, the first generation of French photographers
mainly consisted of artists who trained primarily as painters and graphic artists: their
works were the visual antecedents of Atget’s works. As James Borcoman suggests,

Atget’s sensibility is directly linked with the perception of the first generation of

13

photographers.46 Since so many approaches are possible, I will follow the criticism
generated by major Paris photographers.

After the invention of the daguerreotype, cityscapes were the most popular
photographic subject with precedents in engraving and painting.47 Paris became the most
important subject of the first daguerreotypes.

The earliest photograph of Paris has been traced back to 1839 when Louis Jacques
Mande' Daguerre captured the image of rue de Temple from his studio (figure 2).
Looking down at the street several floors below, Daguerre focused his camera in the
hopes of ‘freezing the Parisian life around him into the stop-time of a photograph.’48

Daguerre’s invention was soon noticed by critics and generated debates among
them. Early critical discourse on daguerreotypes appeared to focus on two facts: their
relation to existing aesthetics and their mechanical components.49 And they polemically
split between those who made daguerreotypes that could be placed within the domain of
art and those who considered it a record of factual detail since no human agent was
involved. Considering later developments, however, early critics played critical roles to
introduce photography’s two inseparable characteristics: ‘documentary’ and ‘art.’

In 1842, the Swiss artist and critic Rodolphe Topffer published a lengthy and
complicated article in which he questions the artistic presentations of photography.50
poffer’s article is a reaction to N. —M. P. Lerebours’ publication of Excursions
daguerriennes, which consisted of two albums of aquatints made by a number of
daguerreotypists (figure 3).51 According to Topffer, the daguerreotype reduces
representation to simple identity, or ‘accuracy itself, completely physical and material.’

Although a painter may similarly aim at the imitation of objects, Topffer insists that

14

painting also includes expression through the artist’s ‘faire,’ or handling, and the
painting’s ‘mode,’ or ‘style.’ The daguerreotype, on the other hand, can achieve imitation
only.52

Stephen C. Pinson, in a recent article, observes that Topffer’s criticism was
characterized by its application of pre-existing aesthetic discourses to photographic
experimentation. According to him, all poffer’s arguments were known and were not
really new. The difference between photography and painting lay in the distinction that
already existed in an aesthetic discourse between imitation and expression, in which
imitation was equated with a low form of art. Here, as Pinson asserts, the spontaneous,
mechanical, or non-manual production of the daguerreotype image opened up a hole in
the already existing debates of deception, imitation, and expression.53

The debates were soon followed by a backlash. Between 1851 and 1862, individual
photographers, among them Antoine Claudet, Eugene Durieu and A. A. E. Disdéri joined
in publishing articles and letters to professional journals that attempted to define
photography’s proper domain and to clarify if photography was or was not ‘art.’54

Eugene Durieu, director of the Administration des C ultes, was an advocate of the
paper negative for recording historical monuments.55 He wrote about photography’s
‘special conditions’ and took a position against retouching photographic prints, thus
revising the non-manual nature of photography in a positive light.56 Critical
characteristics such as ‘real,’ ‘transparent’ and ‘documentary’ began to define a type of

photography even though their methodology mainly focused on the similarities and

differences with the aesthetic of painting.

15

In fact, critics’ or photographers’ consideration of photography’s relationship to art
during the early era was neither fixed nor absolute. Even though this situation reveals the
general confusion in classifying the new medium, it appeared that early critics acted to
open photography’s potential to become an art object with its own qualities such as
‘documentary.’ Additionally, the fact that early critics’ conservative tendency to retain
terms in already established artistic discourses,57 fundamentally acknowledges the fact
that photography related to pre-existing artistic traditions.

Hippolyte Bayard’s photographs on paper provided even more substantial aspects
on this matter. Bayard first exhibited his photographs publicly in July 1839 before the
announcement of the daguerreotype. His photographs were shown among paintings and
critics showed great enthusiasm for the pictures (figure 4).58 Interestingly, however,
reactions to his photography were by no means unified.59 One aspect that seems to have
been important for subsequent debates on photography is that unlike daguerreotype’s
‘scientific’ images, Bayard’s images are characterized by its ambiguous relationship with
the pictorial arts, including painting and drawing.

It was in this context that one of the most brilliant critics of the nineteenth-century,
Francis Wey, gave his support to paper photography. While recognizing the distinctive
qualities of photographic images, Wey positioned photography within an existing
taxonomic system that recognized a general aesthetic linking all the arts. He particularly
commented on Charles Negre’s Le Petit Chiflonier (figure 5) in relation to Realist
paintings. Rather than defining the connection between Realist painting and photography
simply by their subject matter and truthful rendering of fact, Wey emphasized that both

are about making conscious choices as to what facts will be represented and how they

16

will be presented.60 In Negre’s work, for Wey, more than in that of anyone else, the
variety of choices and pictorial effects which can be obtained from the paper negative
was apparent.

The calotype process, which had qualities very different from the daguerreotype’s
polished, mirror-like effect, led many to think of a calotype in terms of drawings or
prints. An official account of the photographic displays noted that calotypists had adopted
the term “print” for paper photographs.61

At this point, photography’s relation to the print tradition is worth considering
because it has essentially illuminated photography’s inherent dual nature as both ‘art’ and
‘document.’ In fact, the inseparability of ‘art’ and ‘document’ in early photography was
reinforced by the preceding tradition of the picturesque in previous art, particularly
graphic prints.

In this context, the most important individual in the mid-nineteenth century is one-
time daguerrean Louis-Desire Blanquart-Evrard. In 1851, he opened his ‘imprimérie
photographique ’ in Lille, which produced at least twenty albums of photographs during
its four years of operation, drawing together the work of some of the finest photographers
of the time, including Hippolyte Bayard, Charles Marville, and Henri Le Secq.62

Some of Blanquart-Evrard’s volumes were straightforward documentary aids for
artists, notably reproductions of two-dimensional art such as paintings, drawings, and
prints (figure 6). But other photographs, including some that have a documentary
function, were clearly considered in terms of aesthetic potential (figure 7). Blanquart-

Evrard had predicted in 1847 that “the perfection of a paper process would not only assist

l7

men of the world, scholars, historians, and archaeologists, but artists, by giving them ‘des
vues pittoresque, des études d ’ensemble et de de'tail. ”’63

The cityscape photographs published by Blanquart-Evrard in the album Paris
Photographique are clear examples of ‘des vues pittoresque.’ This album includes some
of Marville’s and Le Secq’s earliest Paris photographs. In presentation, as well as choice
of subject, their Paris documents clearly reflect their affinity with earlier French
topographical prints, a matter to which we shall return in the next chapter. Considering
the relationship between photography and prints, Le Secq’s photographs are a key link.64

Le Secq’s images have been often considered the photographic equivalent of
Charles Meryon’s etchings. So many of the sites photographed by Le Secq coincide with
the subjects of Meryon’s Eaux—fortes sur Paris.65 The best example is Le Secq’s
photograph of the site of Le Petit Pont (figure 8), which provides a striking resemblance
to Charles Meryon’s etching Le Petit Pont (1850), a print that Le Secq possessed.66 Here,
Le Secq chose the upper viewpoint of the etching’s double perspective, capturing the
moment when demolition of the Petit Pont was beginning, with a temporary wooden
walkway thrown diagonally across the river. As Eugenia Parry Janis sees it, a strong tie
between Le Secq’s and the well established picturesque tradition in the graphic arts
seems clear.67

While Le Secq devoted the remainder of his career to his painting, printmaking, and
collecting after 1856,68 Charles Marville found an opposite direction. According to
Constance Cain Hungerford,69 Marville worked as a designer of wood-engraved

illustrations for books and popular periodicals for 17 years before he took up

photography in 1851. His early experience constituted an important foundation on which

18

to build from graphic artistry to calotype photography, the newest medium, in which he
relied on tones rather than colors for effect. His view of Francfort (figure 9), for
example, shows much the same effect found in his wood engravings (figure10). Two
images are parallel in emphasizing the planes of his subjects, which then contrast
distinctly with each other in tone, dramatic light and shadow pattern.

Looking at these earliest photographs of Paris and their related criticism, we see
that the existing discourse on painting and the previous tradition of print media played a
key role in figuring photography’s inherent characteristics and helped to construct its
original place within the reproductive arts. Early photographers we have traced possess
relevant artistic traditions on which to build.

However, through the process we also notice that the new medium demanded a
different way of seeing. It could be seen more or less as contradictory to the hope of early
criticism: clearly, photography was not only an art of description during the nineteenth-
century. Eugenia Parry Janis explains that the new medium was limited to showing the
here and now from a single vantage point, one moment at a time. Thus, she continues, it
selects from the situation it purports to record.70 This nature of straightforward document
provides a more potent emotional appeal by permitting the viewer to use his/her
imagination to fill in what is not seen, as we frequently sense in the works of Le Secq,

Marville and their contemporaries. Banquart-Evrard well summarized this process:

La photographic n’est plus une experience de physique, don’t les resultants
sont invariables et independents de l’opérateur. Desormais 1e gout et le
sentiment concourront a les comple'ter. 1

l9

For early French photographers, the concept of ‘documentary’ did not entail the
pretense of impersonal objectivity which has often come to be associated with it. Thus it
seems quite natural that their portrayals of the city kept raising issues and touching
feelings and affecting attitude whose implications resound throughout the nineteenth-
century.

In spite of the lack of information regarding Atget’s training as a professional
photographer, certain characteristics of Atget’s early pictures suggest that he was aware
of the potential of early photographic traditions. Contrary to scholarly opinion, his
topographical recordings emerged in circumstances characterized more by traditional
respect and less by responsiveness to market considerations. Given this emphasis, we will

examine Atget’s works more closely in the next chapter.

20

2. Atget and the Aesthetics of Early French Topographical Records

Atget was fundamentally a freelance photographer: he was not officially attached
to an institution, nor did he work for an agency or distributor.72 Atget already started to
photograph architecture and street scenes in the 18805 before he acquired his first public
commission from the Commission des Monuments Historiques in 1898.73 Based on these
facts, his initial topographical photographs appear to have been made for his own interest.
However, the kind of subjects and their categorization suggest that Atget was already
thinking of photography as a profession. His first public commission might play an
important role in the context of a professional photographic career.74

One cannot easily determine how the Committee expected Atget’s photographs to
operate within the archival tradition or its frameworks. Compared to other commercial
photographers of the time, however, Atget’s early site photographs show a strong
attachment to earlier generations of topographical records, which then restored the French
public archival collection.75 These aspects can be examined on two levels.

First, in terms of subject and style, Atget’s work may be analyzed as a continuum
of the romantic topographical recordings of historical France. From about 1897, Atget
adopted Paris as his principal subjects. He was particularly concerned with aspects of
Parisian life that were disappearing and with buildings of historical significance,
whatever their present appearance. While most city pictures reflect the same basic
documentary concerns as the rural ones, Atget effectively assembled a pictorial
encyclopedia of the city at the same time. As Edward J. Sozanski describes, they are

almost exclusively expressive of place and concerned with objects.76 James Borcoman

21

observes that Atget’s desire to record the evidence of the formal glories of French
civilization and his sensibility to the presence of the object are direct links with the
perception of earlier photographers like Hippolyte Bayard, Gustave Le Gray, Henri Le
Secq.77 We could assume that during his early experimental period, Atget probably had
the opportunity to review the photographs of previous generations that were mainly
produced for public commissions. French photographic archives made by older masters
of photography have a great potential as an aesthetic reserve.78 Their photographs might
also now function as instructive precedents. Particularly Charles Marville’s works
seemed to provide a visionary model for Atget. Atget’s talent for composition and his eye
for the definitive detail are heavily indebted to Marville, a matter to which we shall
return. Secondly, his photographs took a different direction from the photographic option
of instantaneity at the end of the nineteenth-century. Instantaneity seemed to authenticate
the experience of modern life. But it did not attract him. Interestingly, this aspect
connects Atget’s photographs to older images. Sometimes his pictures even allude to the
supreme stillness of the earliest daguerreotypes.

The topographical view was already a well-established art form, especially in
drawing and painting and particularly in printmaking.79 The picturesque tradition was
established by the Voyages Pittoresque dans l’Ancienne France, which laid the basis for
the conventions of topographic imagery in nineteenth-century France. These picturesque
images were colored by nostalgia for the past. In particular, architectural monuments
were seen to be a concrete link with ‘a noble past, symbols of heroic times, and a spur to

poetic imaginings (figure ll).’80

22

In this context, the importance of the Mission Héliographique, the first official
photographic survey of historical monuments in France in 1851, should be mentioned.
Despite its purely scientific aims, the images made by the Mission not only created the
conventions of French topographical photographic aesthetics but also represented an
important stage in French landscape photography.81

The five photographers engaged in this innovative documentation were Edouard
Denis Baldus, Hippolyte Bayard, Gustave Le Gray, Henri Le Secq, and O. Mestral.
Despite the fact that photographers received itineraries and instructions—quite exact at
times—detailing the locations to be photographed, the remaining photographs testify to
the photographers’ individual artistic approaches to this public commission.82

Le Grey and O. Mestral, who decided to travel together, photographed the view of
the Chdteaux de la Loire. They focused on motifs other than architecture such as a mass
of foliage that formed the contour of an old house. A certain distance into the landscape
view appears to offer a strong aesthetic potential (figure 12).83

The most interesting case is Le Secq’s. His interest in architectural details and
stylistic characteristics such as crisply defined forms and strong contrasts bring to mind
Atget’s architectural views of Paris (figures 13, 14). In particular, the mixture of realism
and poetic image that makes Le Secq’s works so appealing, and, as Michel F rizot noted,
“Romantic nostalgia was beginning to turn into the message of the ‘ancient.”’84

To some extent, these photographic landscapes belong to the preceding tradition
of the picturesque found in engraved or lithographed topographical views.85 Typically

these images combined a documentary impulse to create both an accurate description of

the featured monuments and a romantic atmosphere. Old buildings, while recognizably

23

detailed, were presented in ways that stimulated “an awareness of the effects of passing
time.”86 Early topographic photography could not be detached from the pictorial
conventions determined by the laws of painting and printmaking of this genre.87 The
finest archival mode in photography seemed to have been established in keeping with
early nineteenth century topographical aesthetics.

It is worthwhile to compare Atget’s photographs with those of his competitors for
a fuller understanding. At the turn of the century, a number of French agencies, both
governmental and private, were building photographic archives. There were literally
hundreds of commercial photographers either working or who had negatives on file for
sale in Paris at the turn of the century.88 The most successful of these included Neurdein,
Giradon, Louis Vert and Paul Géniaux.

The professional photographer closest to Atget’s work was the photographer of
the petit métiers, Louis Vert. Vert learned photography from Petitot and was active
around 1904-1906.89 Atget and Vert show an almost parallel style in depicting similar
subject matter. For example (figures 15, 16), both photographers have isolated the
subject of interest in the center of the frame. Unlike Vert, however, Atget chose
romanticized and idealized images of the lampshade seller rather than representing the
poor people of Paris. In Vert’s photograph, the figure is shown sweeping with her right
foot momentarily off the ground. In contrast, Atget’s lampshade seller clearly intended to
stand static and posed in the technically manipulated space in a manner that accentuated
the romantic atmosphere of the picture rather than a merely factual image of a lampshade

seller. As noted earlier, the ‘stillness’ of Atget’s photograph is contrary to the

24

‘instantaneous’ style of contemporary documentary photographs. Thus we can
characterize his work as more traditional than theirs.

During a period of urban renewal in Paris under Baron Haussmann, certain
commissions from official bodies gave photographers a chance to re-introduce an
element of the picturesque into their cityscapes.90 Nostalgia for the past with a growing
interest in the city’s history might have affected this trend. Charles Marville’s work, in
this respect, seemed to act as a bridge between early photographic experimentation and
Atget’s works.

According to Nesbit, Atget probably saw Marville’s photographs in the Musée
Carnavalet and the Bibliothéque Historique around 1898 or 1899.91

It is not known how and when Marville became an official photographer for the
city of Paris because most of the city’s records were destroyed in 1871 when the Hotel-
de- Ville was burned. However, many contemporary artists and collectors had already
recognized Marville’s talents. For example, Nadar, comparing him to the Bisson brothers,
said this of Marville: “Only Marville (a painter yet!), with the remarkable photographs he
did for the Paris Archives, could be considered their equal.”92

The relationship between Atget and Marville can be viewed on two levels. First is
in the choice of subject, Atget was often influenced by Marville. Some of Atget’s earliest
photographs were based directly on Marville’s of the same site (figures 17, 18). Besides
having almost the same subject matter, the visual similarities can be seen even though
their early works were done at cross-purposes.93 For example, an arch or the edge of an

adjacent building often serves to frame compositions at the top and sides. The light serves

25

to highlight the central building while everything around it remains in deep shadow
(figures 19, 20).

In the most popular Paris pictures of that time, the camera appears to hover before
the facade head-on, dead center (figure 21).” Compared to those, Atget kept his distance
from his subjects, which usually loomed hazily at the end of the street. This kind of
distance links him not only to Marville, but also to specific painters with strong formalist
concerns, a matter to which we shall return.

Atget had to compete with other photographers for commissions. For this reason,
it is crucial to a photographer like Atget that his works be seen purely as photographic as
well as an art form in their own right. Marville’s artistic documentary provided Atget
with an unusual model for photographic representations.

Adjusting his style between the limits of the public commission and artistry
sensibility, Atget gradually evolved a mature style. Atget’s work could be seen as a clear
example of an intellectually sophisticated attempt to renew the traditional archival mode.
The stylistic and methodical characteristics found in his works make his intention more
clear. The following discussion examines theses characteristics as the major aspects of

Atget’s style.

26

CHAPTER III

CHARACTERISTICS OF ATGET’S EARLY PHOTOGRAPHS

1. ‘Document pour Artist’

To keep track of his print sales, commissions and potential business contacts,
Atget kept a small notebook entitled ‘Re'pertoire. ’ This handwritten notebook remains the
main source of information about his clients. According to this list, Atget sought out
every kind of client throughout his career, including painters, draftsmen, illustrators,
engravers, interior decorators, designers for the theater and cinema, collectors, libraries,
‘amateurs’ of old Paris, architects, iron workers, stone carvers, wood workers, and
publishing houses.95

Due to the commercial nature of his early career, scholars generally agree that
Atget’s pictures reflect his customers’ taste; however, if we consider Atget’s
photographs, we wonder why the stylistic consistency of work is not matched by the
diversity of customers. Some pictures can hardly be understood as sketches for custom-
made purposes. More interesting is the fact that pictures taken as early as 1890 already
suggest a specific stylistic tendency.

At this point we should focus on a short notice in the Revue des Beaux-Arts because

it provides informative details about his initial customers:

Photographies .——Nous recommendons a nos lectures M. Atget, Photographe.
5, rue de la Pitie’ (Paris), qui tient a la disposition des artistes: paysages,

27

animaux, fleurs, monuments, documents, premiers plans pour artistes,

reproductions de tableaus, de'placement. Collections n’e’tant pas dans le

commerce.96

Unlike the ‘Re'pertoire ’ which Atget began around 1900,97 this announcement
suggests that his first customers were painters. More importantly, during this early
period, there were subject areas that Atget found interesting or important beyond mere
documents. Atget characteristically built his early career with scenic pictures in terms of
rural or urban landscape.98

At this point, we should ask what Atget learned from the experience of making
photographic documents for artists. Photographers like Atget, who do not have any
formal education, are likely to draw on early visual experiences that play an important
role in determining their preferred techniques or artistic vision. Maria Morris noted that
by making documents for artists, Atget became peripherally acquainted with the
traditions, training, practice and current trends in painting.99 There is no question that the
photographer rapidly assumed many of the more routine aspects of picture making. The
extent to which Atget adjusted his personal tastes to those of his customers is difficult to
determine. However, we may assume that making aids for artists must have provided
important opportunities in his initial, experimental period. The access to painters helped
him to become a fixture in the Parisian artistic community. Consequently he would have
been aware of artistic conventions and artistic debates around Salon as well as significant
changes in French art in that period.100 As a commercial photographer, he might
gradually tailor his choice of imagery, its format, and presentation to suit the needs of

that market.

28

At some point, Atget’s style underwent major changes quite different with more
illustrious romanticism shown in his earliest photographs. He began to carefully
manipulate the scenery for more compositional effects (figure 22). Formally, the images
have visual properties that parallel specific styles found in contemporary French painting.

The most interesting examples are photographs of urban views that seem to be
taken before Atget won the public commission. In these pictures, Atget avoided strictly
axial views when composing the individual images, and he consistently positioned his
camera slightly to one side in order to enhance a feeling of looking through a succession
of spaces (figure 23). This kind of spatial consideration particularly recalls one of
Gustave Caillebotte’s paintings (figure 24). There are similarities in the choice of
subjects, but more importantly there is a strong similarity in the approach to constructing
space. Other pictures taken of city laborers also show a strong relationship in terms of the
figure’s pose and general mood (figures 25, 26). Besides the photos of laborers, Atget’s
picture of Porte d ’Arceuil Boulevard Jourdan (figure 27) is similar to Caillbotte’s The
Park on the Caillebotte property at Yerres (figure 28). Like a painter, Atget used the
conventional rendering system for the odd spatial effects and concentrated to modulate
space with architectural elements in the photographs. There, space was clearly considered
as one of the pictorial elements rather than a natural aspect of the motif. In the study of
Caillebotte’s pictorial space, Peter Galassi said that Caillebotte’s careful attention to
perspective links him directly to George Seurat and eventually to others with strong
formalist concerns.lOl Atget’s pictorial concern about constructing space could be

considered in the same context with Caillebotte’s. While turning away from a

29

‘Pictorialistic’ approach to painting, Atget was simultaneously influenced by another
pictorial concern: the formalistic concerns in constructing space.

At this point, it is important to note the fact that Berenice Abbott, who first
‘discovered’ Atget in Man Ray’s Paris studio, already described the relationship between
Atget’s work and Impressionistic paintings.102 Atget had impressionistic vision in terms
of his choice of subject: he photographed the city and rural landscapes, Parisian people
and street scenes. In addition, the picturesque assembly of traditional rural dwellings
along a natural curved, unpaved path in Atget’s pictures has clear visual affinities with
Impressionistic paintings (figures 29, 30, 31). Atget’s growing tendency toward
formalistic concerns and the sensation of his works, however, link him closely to the
Post-Impressionists of the 1880s-9OS, and account for the similarity of his work to that of
Paul Cézanne and Paul Gaugin. Particularly Cézanne’s paintings are worth considering in
many ways.

It has been suggested that Cezanne was not averse to using a photograph as an aide-
mémoire in the studio.103 Recent studies of the locations of Ce’zanne’s paintings,
including comparisons with documentary photographs, show how he both responded to
visual structures that already existed at the site and adjusted those structures according to
his own vision and his personal perceptual experience (figures 32, 33).104 Cézanne’s
picture-making process clearly recalls Atget’s use of architectural motif in defining

0.105 He seemed to use every architectural

picture space first appeared around 1899—190
shape and deftly compose them together to provide the structure of his pictures and, as
Maria Morris Hambourg observes, enhanced the geometric structures of his motifs

through lighting and framing.106 As a result, Atget’s space became to appear sophisticated

30

and controlled as if his locations were not simply found; rather, through a careful process
of selection and discrimination, the places are actively constructed by the photographer
(figure 34).107 Considering his later works, this period marks a critical point. Atget’s
style shows tremendous changes from this time. No more traces of fragmentation were
found in his photos and the individual parts of his pictures became subordinate to the
whole.

Similar aspects between Atget’s and Ce'zanne’s work should be considered as a
result of similar explorations of the possibilities of new spatial constructions. As we
discussed earlier, Atget appears to have been trained to accept new perceptual patterns
while making documents for painters. Based on this sensitivity, he explored themes that
were modeled on existing artistic prototypes, and he began to experiment with pictorial
constructions of space. In this process, be affected the practices of specific painters as an
inspiration.

The similarity of Atget’s compositional structures with that of Japanese wood prints
could be understood in the same context. The influence exerted by Japanese art on late
nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Western Painting is already widely recognized.
The compositional resemblance and the possibility of shifting viewpoints between
Atget’s photography and Utagawa Hiroshige’s prints clearly demonstrate that J aponism’s
impact was not limited to painting (figure 35).

Atget’s scenic pictures clearly undermined object-oriented ways of seeing (which
were traditionally accepted in the photographic medium) and parallels a specific tendency
found in contemporary French painting. Atget’s attitude seems to be related to the

principles of the Post-Impressionists who were reacting against the “instantaneous”

31

vision of Impressionist painters but who still maintained their characteristic strategy; a
contentious involvement with tradition.

In fact, composition was considered to be one of the primary criteria for artistic
status of the work. Fine composition was believed to be beyond the reach of most
photographers since their medium offers them less control of other elements than painters
of natural scenes. This point was discussed at length by Disde’ri in L ’Art de la
photography, wherein he offered guidelines for permissible manipulation of the subject;
for example, adding figures or accessories, altering camera placement or angle, or
waiting for the best natural lighting to enhance the subject.108 As early as the 18603, the
photographer Francis F rith had complained of just this problem in relation to landscape

work:

Very rarely indeed does a landscape arrange itself upon the photographer’s
focusing glass as well, as effectively, as he would arrange it if he could. No
man is so painfully conscious as he that nature’s lights and shades are
generally woefully patch and ineffective... in short, that although his
chemical knowledge be perfectly adequate and his manipulation faultless, it is
a marvel, an accident, a chance in a thousand when a picture turns out as
artistic, in every respect, as his cultivated taste could wish.109

Considering the conditions that photographers face, Atget’s decisions to take
images with long exposure times and his repetitive use of pictorial structure must have
been thoughtful artistic choices.

Almost concurrent with the exploration of landscapes Atget expanded his repertoire
to include seascapes.110 Atget photographed his few seascapes and studies of boats at
Boulogne-sur-Mer and nearby Etaples on the English Channel, and at La Rochelle, on the

111

Atlantic coast. The most intriguing image is the one he took in La Rochelle in 1896

32

(figure 36). According to Maria Morris Hambourg, this seascape clearly demonstrates a
real understanding of camera position in the way the dark boats are pitched like musical
notes across the smooth tidal sands of the harbor.112 Atget’s desire to produce images that
could compete with decorative prints or paintings seems to have intensified following the
success of La Rochelle.

Landscape has an instructive history in art photography, later known as
Pictorialism. Art photographers regarded landscape with a sense of elegiac melancholy.
Instead of the crisply defined forms and strong contrast of earlier topographical imagery,

”3 There is no

they offered the vague shapes and subdued tonalities (figure 37).
documentation how Atget reacted to this contemporary photographic trend; however,
Atget’s pictures demonstrate that he was indifferent to the Pictorialistic understanding of
‘good’ pictures.

Considering later works, this marks the stage at which Atget advanced from taking
merely useful images to creating products that arranged subjects from nature in
deliberately artistic ways. He didn’t just go through a mechanical process to produce his
pictures; he designed his pictures with the subjective intentions and preferences of so-
called romantic formalism. Atget’s role in his work was completely removed from the
normal understanding of the role of photographers. Photography had even been assigned
a legal status which did not include any creative act on the part of the photographer. In

1861 , Tribunal de Commerce describes photography’s limitation as the form of

representation:

The art of the photographer does not consist in the creation of subjects as its
own creation, but in the getting of negatives and subsequently in the making

33

of prints which reproduce the image of objects by mechanical means and in a

servile way.114

It is useful to consider Atget’s early photographs in light of the representational
aspects that had been constructed in the contentious involvement of tradition. The
purpose and meaning of the seriality in Atget’s works and its evolving aspects will be

examined in the next chapter.

34

2. Seriality and Perspective

Atget made a series of photographs capturing specific objects and locations. His
series became more methodical as his work progressed. According to Maria Morris, there
were five major series in Atget’s work: Landscape-Document, Art in Old Paris, Art in the
Environs, Picturesque Paris, and the Topography of old Paris. There were also smaller
groupings of sub-series.115 These series were divided according to subject, thus individual
photographs act as discrete expressions of the larger idea. For example, a doorknocker
was not so much an example of the craftsman’s skill, or an ornament of a street in the
fourth “arrondissment ” in Paris, as it was part of the Art of Old Paris.l '6

In many ways, Atget’s serial system strengthens a new visual context. Seriality
was the vehicle for these new images to come alive, to have meaning, to have use. It is
especially interesting given the fact that the characteristics of the series are represented
by their allusive titles which function to link each internal picture. For example, the series
of street peddlers (originally created to define the subject of Old Paris) began in 1898, but
it was extended into his next series, Picturesque Paris. This transfer signifies a clear
change of Atget’s intention in photographing street people. In other words, through the
process of borrowing traditional iconography, I think that Atget had become aware of the
fact that existing tradition could be perceived differently in the new visual contexts.

Petits Métiers were informed by the subject’s long tradition among graphic artists
in Paris. As early as the seventeenth century, artists like J. B. H. Bonnart were engraving

images of street vendors in series called ‘les Cris de Paris’ or ‘Les Cris de la Rue. ’ In the

eighteenth-century, Edmé Bouchardon produced an especially famous series of this sort,

35

and the tradition was continued by lithographers like Carle Vemet and Achille-Louis
Martinet. Charle Negre’s isolated depictions of the poor have also been suggested as
possible visual sources for this imagery in photography (see figure 5). Later in the
nineteenth century, artists eschewed the past conventions of the series and preferred, like
Daumier, Guys, and Gavami, to sketch the attitudes of the new middle class. But the
‘Petits Métier’ remained alive as tiny, incidental figures in topographic images of old
Paris, and at the turn of the century interest in them revived because changes in
commerce and industry were quickly making them obsolete. ”7 They were the human
counterpart to the old houses and tiny shops that gave such characteristic charm in old
Paris. Atget’s pictures were conceived in this context. Soon Atget pursued the same
subject in the Picturesque Paris series. The static postures of street peddlers had changed
to the unstructured activity of the people of the street (figure 38). At this point, we should
ask what kind of aspects in Atget’s ‘Petit Métiers" series is different from their older,
printed counterparts?

Atget worked with an older iconographic tradition, combining optically derived
representation with current pictorial concerns of representation. Photographs like
F Iueriste and Street Vendor (figure 39) provide valuable examples of the combined
manners of representation.

In these two pictures, the merchant and customer are centered in the frame. While
the actors’ formal inertia suggests that they posed for the photographer, it appears to
depict the activity of an actual exchange between them. Interestingly, the backgrounds of
all the photographs are out of focus but in varying degrees, which seems incompatible

with Atget’s other technically manipulated space. Probably Atget kept the subject’s

36

graphic tradition in mind, but considering later development, these pictures show Atget’s
ability to use a constant format to record different types of images. In this way, these
pictures did not belie his other subjects.

Not all of the series that Atget compiled had similar content; some were similar in
form. In particular, in most of the Parisian view pictures included in the series of Old
Paris and Picturesque Paris, he systematically applied the perspectival imagery (figure
40). In fact, the use of perspectival imagery played a key role in producing ‘lyrical

’ 1 18 which is mentioned by nearly every commentator on

understanding of the street,
Atget.

One of the possible sources of this is, as seen in the previous chapter, Marville’s
pictorial space. Guillaume le Gal claims the theatrical metaphor is persistent in Atget’s
pictures. He suggests that Atget’s scenographic reconstruction offers something like the
reduction of a stage set from naturalistic theatre, such as Antoine’s Free Theatre in
F rance.119 It is highly unlikely that Atget intended a stage-set effect in his picture as
equivalent to a formal solution because using perspectival composition as a visual device
for a metaphorical purpose was already prevalent in the visual arts media, including
painting and prints. As I observed in the previous chapter, his exaggeration of the
presence of perspective is more likely to be related to a contemporary painter’s careful
attention to perspective as a system of idealization and formalistic expression. However,
it is important to note that the rich experience of Atget’s early career is still present in the
range of possible interpretations of Atget’s photographic style.

Judging from the lack of contemporary criticism, Atget’s photographs were not

very successful in his time; he may have grossly misjudged the commercial value of his

37

work and the photographer’s silence on his work. Atget didn’t run an artistic studio and
refused to be involved in any kind of artistic movement. However, the richly layered
references to other types of art in Atget’s work indicate some of the ways in which a
commercial photographer could explore aesthetic concerns and make an imprint in a

broader historical context.

38

Conclusion

After Heinrich Schwarz’s influential article “Art and Photography: Forerunners
and Influences” was published in 1945, many historians of art and photography have
been interested in the issues regarding photography’s historical evolution and its
relationship with traditional art. '20 My study concerning the historical context of Atget’s
photography was initiated from the above argument. I have been specifically interested in
the visual antecedents of Atget’s photography since his photographs acted as a bridge
connecting nineteenth-century and twentieth-century photography.

Atget’s influence on later generations of photographers is tremendous. I hoped
that if we could clarify the relationship between Atget and traditional art, we could
provide a more complete historical contexts of 19th century and early 20th century
photography. While analyzing Atget’s photographic roots, as I expected, I was able to
show that Atget’s work departed from the preceding tradition of French topographical
records, which are both aesthetic and documentary in nature. His aim to photograph
aspects of Paris was to record topography, however, Atget did not avoid personalized
representation of City of Paris. Irnportantly, I clarified that Charles Marville’s work led
Atget to involve pictorial representation of space, a process which had normally only
been associated with other artistic mediums.

Despite the lack of concrete sources on his early life, his early work confirms that
Atget’s previous work experience did (consciously or unconsciously) influence his
photography. A good part of his early years had been devoted to a search of photographic

presentation of Paris. And around 1900, Atget seemed to solve the formal problems he

39

had been trying to work out during the course of the previous years. This study examined
that his early experience as a document producer for artists functioned like initial artistic
training courses. His visual acumen established during this period affected throughout his
remaining years.

This research also revealed that Atget’s images refer to the strategic images
borrowed from other medituns. Interestingly Atget’s methodical working manner mostly
focused on the same strategies that were legitimizing photography as art, which was
conceived from the time photography was beginning. In fact, Atget did not attempt to
revolutionize the pictorial tradition that he inherited. Atget fashioned his images by
inflecting pictorial conventions with strategies drawn from the other media. Borrowing
specific compositional elements from the work of topographic photographers,
contemporary painters and possibly, theatrical designers, Atget devised a specialized
pictorial rhetoric to persuade viewers that photography work on both the documentary
and artistic level, and that his pictures could take part in this effort. In particular,
decision-making was an important part of Atget’s picture-making process. Refusing to
provide any instantaneous vision of his time, he carefully made pictures that were self-
consciously to be informative and expressive. It may lay in this aesthetic action if the
notion of objective record or documentary cannot account for the difference between
Atget’s photographs and the others. Therefore, it is accurate to consider that the decision
procedure is one of the most influential aspects in Atget’s work considering later
generations of photographers.

Essentially, Atget’s work is a synthesis of elemental photographs, many of which

were made in the service of the whole. Aspects of Atget’s work embraced the historical,

40

the documentary and elements of the pictorial. These aspects existed to some extent
through all the chronological periods of Atget’s photography.

Atget combined topographic convention with landscape sensibility developed in
other artistic media. In the process, photography revealed another important quality: a
means of expressing individual creativity. The definition of ‘new documentary

photography’ by Allen Sekula accurately describes Atget’s work:

Documentary is thought to be art when it transcends its reference to the world,
when the work can be regarded, first and foremost, as an act of self-
expression on the part of the artist.121

41

  

Figure 1. Eugene Atget, Painting of Two Trees, before 1913,
oil on panel, MoMA, New York.

 

Figure 2. L.J.M Daguerre, View of the Boulevard du Temple, 1839,

daguerreotype, Paris, Stadtmuseum, Munich.

42

 

Figure 3. Sigismond Himely, Entrance to the Library, the Louvre, 1843,
from N. M. P Lerebours, “Excursions daguerriennes,” 2nd series, 1843,

aquatint on mounted china paper after a daguerreotype, Paris.

 

 

Figure 4. Hippolyte Bayard, Remains of Barricades in Rue Royale, 1849,

albumen print, Société Franeaise du Photographic, Paris.

43

 

Figure 5. Charles Negre, Le petit chiflonier, 1851,

salted paper print from waxed paper negative, private collection, New York.

 

Figure 6. Victor Regnault, (attributed to), Still life on Trestles,
printed by Louis-Desire Blanquart-Evrard in “Etudes photographique,”
lst series, no.17, 1853, Bibliotheque Municipale, Lille.

44

 

 

 

Figure 7. Charles Marville, The Open Gate,
printed by Louis-Desire Blanquart-Evrard in “Etudes photographique,”
lst series, no.17, 1853, Bibliothéque Municipale, Lille.

 

,9. . Elli; {3,

K m.Il|lllIl'.ll‘illll

gift?”

, “t.-.
'r.:~ . u . . ~,
,. _- 4....

 

Figure 8. Henri Le Secq, Block of houses of the Marché-Neuf and the Petit Pant,
Photograph, 1852, Bibliotheque des Arts Décoratifs, Paris.

45

 

a-

l
l
32:4 ' l
w humAHK—iAnimu-Aiuuum'm.‘t~l4
l

‘--" "r'ca rm}, ,

 

 

Figure 9. Charles Marville, Francfort,

calotype, undated, Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris.

 

 

 

.‘lllsT-DESIS

 

Figure 10. Charles Marville, Saint Denis,

wood engraving from Charles Nodier, “La Seine et ses bords,” 1836, Paris.

46

 

 

 

 

Figure 11. Alexandre-Evaruste Fragonard,
Fragments, Large Church of the Abbey of Saint Wandrille, 1820,

from Baron Isidore Taylor, Charles Nodier and Alphonse de Cailleux,
“Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’Ancienne France,”
vol.1, Ancienne Normandie, Paris, 1820, pl.24,
Lithograph in black ink, graduated tint stone,
by Godefroy Engelmann after drawing by A. E Fragonard, Paris.

47

 

 

Figure 12. Gustave Le Gray, The Covered Allée at Bagnewr in Anjou, 1851,

modern print from original paper negative,

Musée d’Orsay(on loan from the Archives Photographique du Patrimonie), Paris.

 

 

 

Figure 13. Henri Le Secq, Chartres, c.1851 photolithograph on stone by Lemercier,

from original paper negative by Le Secq, Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris.

48

........‘. -..‘.,«,..Wnp» nun

 

 

Figure 14. Eugene Atget, Ancien College du Chance, [2 rue de Biévre, fondé en 1343
par Guillaume de Chanac, Eve‘qye de Paris, 1900, albumen print, MoMA, New York.

49

 

 

 

 

 

albumen print, 1899-1900, Musée Camavalet, Paris.

50

 

 

 

 

Figure 16. Vert, Balayeuse, Place de l 'Ho'tel-de- Ville, c.1906,

in “Dans les rues de Paris,” Paris.

51

 

-. .L._.' ‘i' "u “I i. ‘ Y ' 25..

Figure 17. Charles Marville, Maison de la rue de la Tannerie a Abbeville,
habitée par Francois 1 er en 1540, printed by Louis-Desire Blanquart—Evrard
in “Variétés photographiques,” 1851-55,

Collection Macqueron, Bibliothéque Municipale, Abbeville.

 

. Kai ‘ , . . SN
Figure 18. Eugene Atget, Maison a Abbeville, before 1900,

albumen silver print, MoMA, New York.

52

 

.5333??? n
. . Fly ,a

 

19. Charles Marville, no. I 10, Rue Estienne, 1865, calotype,

igure

F

Bibliotheque Administrative de la Ville de Paris, Paris.

53

:. ;illlii'lYfl‘

 

 

Figure 20. Eugene Atget, St. Etienne du Mont rue de la Montagne, Saint Genevieve, 5 arr.,

1898, albumen silver print, Bibliotheque Administrative de la Ville de Paris, Paris.

54

-.“.v ._' Y, ‘ 7‘

12.--; 5 —.~ - _. ’_ - ‘44,...”

1 w_H.KilGHT«Az, 'o‘rHE —‘
“V 9‘7"- “. w— ..

' I
‘

 

 

 

. ..L. E__M__ _ ..__l

Figure 22. Eugene Atget, Villejuif ancient chateau des comtes dc Saint-Roman, 1901,
albumen silver print, MoMA, New York.

55

 

 

Figure 23. Eugene Atget, The Old School of medicine, rue de la Bucherie, 1898,

albumen silver print, MoMA, New York.

 

    

..o ~' at
Figure 24. Gustave Caillebotte, Rue de Paris: Temps de Pluie, 1877,

oil on canvas, Petit-Gennevilliers, Paris.

56

 

 

 

Figure 26. Eugene Atget, Bitumiers, 1899—1900, albumen silver print,
MoMA, New York.

57

 

 

 

 

Figure 28. Gustave Caillebotte, The Park on the Caillebotte property at Yerres,

1875, oil on canvas, Paris.

58

 

 

._- ___l

Figure 29. Eugene Atget, Abbeville (Chemin), before 1900,

 

   

albumen silver print, MoMA, New York.

 

Figure 30. Eugene Atget, Abbeville, before 1900,
albumen silver print, MoMA, New York.

59

 

 

Figure 31. Alfred Sisley, Avenue of Chestnut Trees at La C elle-Saint Cloud,

1867, oil on canvas, Paris.

60

 

 

Figure 32. Montgeroult, Val d ’Oise, c.1935, John Rewald Library Collection,
Archives of the National Gallery of Art, Washigton, D.C.

 

 

Figure 33. Paul Cézanne, Turning Road at Montgeroult, 1898,

oil on canvas, MoMA, New York.

61

 

 

Figure 34. Eugene Atget, Pontoise, place du Grand-Martroy, 1902,
albumen silver print, MoMA, New York.

 

Figure 35. Ando Hiroshige, Nighttime in Saruwakacho, from “One hundred Views of Famous
Places in Edo,” 1857, color woodblock print.

62

 

 

 

    

Figure 36. Eugene Atget, La Rochelle, 1896?,

 

albumen silver print, MoMA, New York.

 

 

 

Figure 37. Robert Demachy, Landscape, c.1904, gum-dichromate print,
Musée D’orsay, Paris.

(resolution of photo reflects artist’s original work)

63

 

 

 

Figure 38. Eugene Atget, Organ Grinder and Street Singers, 1898-99,
albumen silver print, MoMA, New York.

64

 

 

 

 

 

     

it . 4. ”w ' _ l. 3“.

Figure 39. Eugene Atget, Street Vendor, 1899,

albumen silver print, MoMA, New York.

65

 

. ..lllllii . i 1.114111 .i .1 ..i.1llll..l truss-i141... :lilil I

 

 

illes,

aux-Ca
september 1900, albumen silver print, MoMA, New York.

40. Eugene Atget, Passage Vandrezanne, Butte-

igure

F

66

 

1 The first definite knowledge that we have of Atget seems to have come from Man Ray. In 1925, Man
Ray, Atget’s neighbor, bought several of Atget’s photographs, impressed by their unusual effects. He
published them in the Surrealist Magazine La Revolution Surréalist— the only artistic recognition Atget
received in his lifetime. It was Man Ray’s young assistant, Berenice Abbott who saved and introduced
Atget’s work into the American art world again. Abbott persistently worked to preserve the collection and
promote Atget’s work. Her efforts engender an artistic examination of Atget’s work and Museum of
Modern Art purchased the Abbott-Levy collection in 1968. From this time, New York’s Museum of
Modern Art (MoMA) championed the artistic position of Atget’s photographic collection. John
Szarkowski, now retired Director of MoMA’s Photography Department, ardently supports Atget as a
visionary artist who was among the first to realize photography’s potential as a means of self-expression. In
this context, the single most important contribution is that made by Maria Morris Hambourg. She
deciphered Atget’s cryptic numbering system allowing for the approximate dating of his photographs.
Szarkowski and Hambourg maintain that Atget’s oevre reflects a steady technical and artistic maturation.
Their seminal research on the Atget collection of the MoMA published by four volumes books in the
19805.

Berenice Abbott, The World of Atget, New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1964.

Paul Hill and Tom Cooper, “Interview: Man Ray, " Camera 54, no.2, February 1978, pp.37-40.

Maria Morris, Eugene Atget, 1857-1927: The Structure of the Work, Ph.D. Dissertation, Columbia
University, 1980.

2 Although his vast and varied work has led to conflicting critical interpretation, scholars generally agree
that Atget is one of the precursors of modern photography, and was among the first to realize
photography’s potential. However, my impression on Atget criticism is that they each project their own
stereotypes of 19th and 20th century photography on to Atget. The most interesting case is John Szarkowski.
He clearly had his own taste for the documentary and formalistic style, for him, Atget seemed one of the
greatest photographers in 19th century. Particularly Szarkowski tends to privilege what is usually called as
‘art documentary.’ He seems to consider Atget as a forefather of 20th century ‘art documentary’ linking him
the next generation of photographers. Szarkowski’s preference toward specific photographic movement is
seen as too strong to generalize, however, ironically, one should admit that he wrote the most valuable
critics for Atget. Another extreme case is Rosaline Krauss’s. In her influential essay, “Photography ’s
Discursive Space, ” first published in 1982, Rosaline Krauss challenges the recent interest in Atget as a
creative photographer and suggests Atget’s work should be viewed via the model of the archive. She also
objects to what she considers the misappropriation of nineteenth-century photographic “views” into the
canon of the modern art museum. Abigail Solomon-Godeau furthered this argument in her essay, “Canon
Fodder: Authoring Eugene A tget, ” originally published in 1986. In 1986, Molly Nesbit examined the
commercial aspect of Atget’s profession and its impact on his photographs in the article in Art in America,
which followed by the book Atget’s Seven Albums. To her, Atget is no nostalgic but an anarchist activist,
working to politicize the dry document.

Rosaline Krauss, “Photography ’s Discursive Space: Landscape/ View, " Art Journal, winter 1982, pp.3l [-
319.

Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Canon Fodder: Authoring Eugene A tget, ” in Photography at the Dock:
Essays on Photographic History, Institution, and Practice, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1991.

Molly Nesbit, “The Use of History, ” Art in America 74, February 1986 and Atget’s Seven Albums, New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.

3 In the Atget Archives in MoMA, Gene Thornton, “Photography View,” New York Times, 27 Dec, 1981.
4 As stated above, the criticism on Atget tens to split between those who consider him a subtle innovative
artist and those critics who perceive Atget as merely a competent recorder of facts. We shall return to this
matter in the Chapter.2.

5 Maria Morris Hambourg claims that the nature of Atget’s documentary photography had preordained the
place and orientation of many of his pictures in the 1889-1914 periods. However, major structural
innovations of the works were noticed in the works made as early as in 1902. Maria Morris Hamburg, The
Work of Atget, Vol. II, The Art of Old Paris, New York: the Museum of Modern Art, 1982, p.30

6 Molly Nesbit (1992), Atget’s Seven Albums, p.25.

7 The research of John Szarkowski and Maria Morris Hambourg, Molly Nesbit and other scholars has
clarified most of the important features of Atget’s career. But, there is very little information about his early

67

 

life and career. Most of what we know has been provided through the memory of Andre Calmettes and the
research of the French photographic critic, Jean Leroy. For twenty years Leroy worked to unite every scrap
of biographical information he could find. He presented some of his findings in Art et Images and
Camera in 1962. Then he published more complete history of Atget’s art and life in ATGET, Magician
du vieux Paris en son époque, Paris: Pierre Jean Balbo éditeur, 1975.

8 His only record, aside from the pictures, is in the form of business ledgers, albums that he either hoped to
sell or used for showing his wares, and correspondence regarding transaction with bibliothéques. Molly
Nesbit (1992), Atget’s Seven Albums, p.5.

9 The major source of information presented here is from Leroy’s book and articles in the Atget Archives
at the Museum of Modern Art and Berenice Abbott, The World of Atget, New York: Horizon Press, 1964,
and Maria Morris, Eugene Atget, 1857-1927: The Structure of the Work, Ph.D. Dissertation, Columbia
University, 1980.

‘0 For more Atget’s childhood, see Maria Morris (1980), pp.37-42.

” Jean Loroy believes that Atget attended the catholic seminary, but this has not been substantiated.
According to Maria Morris, Atget was not enrolled in either primary or secondary seminary any where in
the Department of the Girond when he spent his early life. See more in Maria Morris (1980), p.42.

'2 There is no document to know Atget’s years at sea. Calmettes’ testimony is the best record. In addition to
his remarks in the letter published by Berenice Abbott in The World of Atget of 1964, he also responded
in an unpublished letter to her questions about Atget’s past. Andre Calmettes to Berenice Abbott, letter of
March 13, 1929, in the Atget Archives at the Museum of Modern Art.

'3 According to Jean Leroy, Atget was overwhelmed by a passion for the theater. See Jean Leroy, “Atget
and His Time,” in the Atget Archives at the Museum of Modern Art, p.2.

‘4 Maria Morris (1980), pp. 46-47.

”meow.

‘6 Ibid, p.49.

'7 Progress at the conservatory was measured by oral examinations administered at semester’s end. The first
one occurred three months after Atget began attending class. Got’s response to his performance was
positive. See more, Maria Morris (1980), p.51

“mung.

'9 Berenice Abbott (1964), The World of Atget, p.xi.

20 Performing in third-rate provincial touring companies, he preferred Romantic plays like Ruy Blas and
roles like that of the legendary rogue hero Robert Macaire.

Colin Weterbeck and Joel Meyerowitz, “Document for artist, " in Bystander: History of Street
Photography, Boston; Little, Brown and Company, 1994, p.109.

21 Andrew Szegedy-Maszak, “Atget ’s Church Interiors, The Wesleyan University Album ”, History of
Photography, vol.l6, no.1, spring 1992, p.5

‘2 The Realist movement came into full force around 1850. See more,

23 Maria Morris claims that Atget possessed handsomely engraved calling cards that expressed his identity
as ‘dramatic artist’ and ‘author-publisher of a photographic anthology of Old Paris.’ See more Maria

Morris (1980), pp.83-85.

2’ Guillaume Le Gall, Atget, Life in Paris, translated by Brian Holmes. Paris: Hazan, 1998, p.9.

2’ According to James Borcoman, the public lecture on photography given by Alphonse Davanne, was
offered at the Sorbonne every Tuesday evening from 2 December 1879 to mod-January 1880. Davanne had
been a founding member of the Sociéte'francaise de Photographic in 1854. A chemist, photographer and
critic, he participated in early successful experiments in photolithography in 1853 and published important
research in photographic chemistry during the 18505 and 18605. James Borcoman, Eugene Atget 1857-
1927, Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1984, p.13.

26 Berenice Abbott(l964), p.x.

”wnnn

2" According to her, Atget sketched “all the time” on any scrap of paper at hand, even at the dinner table.
Maria Morris also provides the date of purchase of panels as an evidence of Atget’s consistent interest in
painting. Maria Morris (1980), p.62,64,65.

9 Particularly two paintings possessed by Valentine Compagnon, now in the collection of the photography
Department, The Museum of Modern Art, New York contrast with other two paintings in technique. Each

68

 

investigates different effects of light, shadow, silhouette, massing, figure ground relationship and painterly
touch. See more Maria Morris (1980), p.65.

3° lbid, p.66.

3' Maria Morris(1980), p.57 and Maria Morris Hambourg (1982), p.14. Molly Nesbit (1982), p.20.

32 See more Maria Morris (1980), pp.75-83.

33 Berenice Abbott, “Eugene Atget, ” The Complete Photographer, no.6, 1941, p.338-339.

34 He developed his negatives in his workroom and then printed them, on albumen or platinum printing-out
paper, in sunlight on the roof of his apartment building. During more than 35 years as a photographer, from
around 1890-91 until his death in 1927, he produced an archive of approximately 8500 images. David
Harris, Eugene Atget: unknown Paris, New York: New Press, 2003, p.21

35 According to Maria Morris, the three clients were all portraits and genre painters approximately Atget’s
age, perhaps acquaintances for his days on the rue des Beaux-Arts. George Maronniez specialized in
seascapes and genre scenes about the life of sailors. Jan Van Beers painted actors and portraits of people in
costume. Edmond Grandjean painted portraits and genre scenes set in the streets. And Florent F e15 wrote of
Detaille’s importance as a client for Atget. Morris found the above information from unearthed article,
“Petite Bleu du Modele,” Art et Critique, no.89, 1892, pp.78-79. See more, Maria Morris (1980), p.59.
See also Floren Fel, “Adjet,”p.28.

3“ Maria Morris (1980), p.31.

’7 In 1925, the American painter and photographer, Man Ray published them in the Surrealist journal La
Revolution Surréaliste. However, Atget refused to credited in the Journal, demurring that his photographs
“were only documents.” Molly Nesbit (1992), p.5.

’8 In terms of history of photography, the word “documentary” has not been defined clearly. Sometimes it
has been described as a forrn or a style, but sometimes it has been related with a movement and a practice.
Historians and critics have frequently drawn attention to the difficulty of defining documentary that cannot
be recognized as possessing a unique style, method or body of techniques. Photography: a critical
introduction (1996), p.69

39 Molly Nesbit (1997), “Photography and History,” in New History of Photography, p. 403.

‘° Molly Besbit (1992), p.9

" Some of the best analyses of the photographic archive work directly with Foucault’s proposition. See
especially Rosaline Krauss, "Photography ’5 Discursive Spaces: Landscape/ View, ” Art Journal, 41 1982,
winter, pp.311-319. M. Foucault describes the term as “the general system of the formation and
transformation of statements.” M. Foucault, L’Archéologie du savoir, p.171. For more on the archive
itself see the issue of Traverse devoted to the subject, no.36, 1986. January.

’2 More correctly, in 20‘h century, this issue related with acceptance of photography’s unique qualities such
as real, transparent and documentary which were related to photography’s mechanic process. There seemed
no early photographic criticism that accepted these qualities as like modern critics.

‘3 See more, Francoise Heilbrun, “The Landscape in French Nineteenth-Century Photography, " in A Day
in the Country, Impressionism and the French Landscape, LA: Los Angeles County Museum of Art,
1984, p.355.

4" It is interesting to note that current criticism on Atget is barely distinguishable from the photographic
debates of the 18505. In some sense they still reiterate polemical point of views expressed by early

criticism. For example some critics seem apply Baudelaire’s standard dichotomy between ‘document’ and
‘art’ in current criticism. For Baudelaire, photography has an ample but undistinguished mission-to enrich
the tourist albums of the bourgeoisie, to save crumbling books and archives, to serve scientists,

astronomers, and archaeologists, and to be the “secretary and clerk’ of whoever needs factual exactitude.
See Charles Baudelaire, “The Salon of 1859, ” in Baudelaire, Art in Paris, trans. Jonathan Mayne, London:
Phaidon, 1965, pp. 149-55.

’5 Nancy Keeler, “The Calotype and Aesthetics in Early Photography, " Paper and Light, The Calotype
in France and Great Britain, 1839-1870, Boston: David R. Godine, Publisher lnc., 1984, p.12.

’6 James Borcoman (1984), p.58.

’7 The history of cityscape of Paris traces back to the middle age. For more, see Dennis Paul Costanzo,
Cityscape and the transformation of Paris during the Second Empire, Ph. D. Thesis dissertation,
University of Michigan, 1981.

’8 Shelley Rice, Parisian Views, MIT Press: Cambridge, London, 1997, p.3.

69

 

’9 Martin Gasser outlined the initial debates about photography as art based upon the distinction between
paper photography and the daguerreotype in “Between “From Today, Painting is dead” and “ How the sun
became a painter” A close look at reactions to photography in Paris 1 839-1853, " Image, vol.33, n05.3-4,
1990-91, pp. 8-29.

Quoted from, Helrnut and Alison Gemsheim, L. J. M. Daguerre, second revised edition, New York:
Dover Publications, 1968, p.79-81.

5° Currently Stephen C. Pinson concerns this album specifically focusing on the reaction of the Swiss
aesthetician Rodolphe Tepffer, one of the earliest critics on photographic process. Pinson’s main argument
is that critics notably Tepffer appropriated elements of the existing rhetoric in pursuit of their own goal.

See more, Stephen C. Pinson, “T rompe l'oeil: Photography 's illusion Reconsidered, " Nineteenth-Century
Art Worldwide, v.1, no.1, Spring 2002.

5' Janet E. Buerger, French Daguerreotypes, The University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London, 1989

.40
{’2 Stephen C. Pinson (2002), p.9.
’3 Ibid, p.10
5’ Naomi Rosenblum, “Photography and Art: The First Phase 1839-1890, " in A World History of
Photography, New York: Abbeville Press, 1997, p.212.
55 Michel Frizot, “Automated Drawing, The truthfulness of the calotype, ” in A New History of
Photography, 1998, p.75.
56 Stephen C. Pinson (2002), p.15.
57 Official description and Catalogue of the Great Exhibition, London, vol. 3, p.1198. The importance of
establishing an agreed vocabulary for photography is underlined in a discussion that took place in a
meeting of the Société héliographique in J une of 1851. Jules Ziegler, the president of the Société,
emphasized that certain terms already established in artistic discourse should be retained in photographic
discourse, and he admonished photographers not to invent new terms unless it were not possible to do other
wise. See more, Margaret Fields Denton, “Francis Wey and the Discourse of Photorgaphy as Art in France
in the Early I 850 ’s: ‘Rien n ’est beau que le vrai; mais it faut 1e choisir, Art History, v.25, no.5,
November 2002, note 23, pp.622-48.
5" His photographic documents were first shown among paintings by such artists as Titian, Poussin,
Tintoretto, Rubens, Vandyke, Rembrandt, Claude Lorrain, Girodet and etc. Martin Gasser (1990-91), p.15
59 Martin Gasser outlined the major debates on Bayard works in July 1939 exhibition. Martin Gasser (1990-
91), pp.15-16.
60 Francis Wey, “Album de la Société héliographique, " La Lumiere, 18 May, 1851, p.58, See Margaret
Fields Denton (2002), p.640.
6' Margaret Fields Denton (2002), p.626, p.646.
62 The first portfolio published by the Imprimerie photographique at Lille, Album photographique de
l’Artist et de l’Amateur, issued serially over the following twelve months, eventually comprised twelve
salted paper prints, each mounted on a plate paper with a gold border and a lithographed legend below the
photograph. In that fall, Blanquart-Evrard began to issue two more albums, Me'langes photographiques and
Paris photographique.
Isabelle Jarnmes, Blanquart-Evrard et les Origins de I’Edition photographique franeaise, Geneva :
Librarie Droz SA, 1981, p.134, 221, 259.
63 Louis-Desire Blanquart-Evrard, “Photographie-procédés employés pour obtenir les épreuves de
photographie sur papier, ” Academic des Science, Paris, Comptes rendus hebdomadaires des séances,
t.24, 1847, p. 123. Quoted from Constance Cain Hungerford, “Charles Marville, popular illustrator: The
Origin of a Photographic Sensibility, " History of Photography, volume 9, no. 3, July-September 1985,
6" Henri Le Secq had been an artistically conventional young painter, one of the horde of Paul Delaroche’
students during the 18305, yet claiming to know his teacher well through assisting him around 1838 on the
Hémycycle decorations of the Ecole des beaux-arts. After an 1842 salon debut and a third-class medal in
1845, received when in Rome, Henri exhibited faithfully at the salon all his life.
Henri Le Secq, Les Artistes, les expositions, 1e jury, Paris, 1866, note, quoted in Eugenia Parry Janis,
“Demolition Picturesque: Photographs of Paris in 1852 and 1853 by Henri Le Secq, ” in Perspectives on
Photography, Essays in honor of Beaumont Newhall, edited by Peter Walch and Thomas F. Barrow,
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986, p.43.

70

 

6’ According to Costanzo, there is a difficulty to establish priority between Meryon and Le Secq because
they are almost contemporary, however, some amount of direct exchange of ideas would seem to be
indicated. On the close parallel between the images of Le Secq and Meryon, See also Eugenia Parry Janis,
“The Man on the tower at Notre Dame: New Light on Henri Le Secq, " Image, XIX, Dec. 1976, pp.13-25.
6" Eugenia Parry Janis (1986), p.38. It is interesting to note that Baudelaire admired Meryon’s etching, so
he whished to contribute to a never-realized collaborative edition of Eaux-Fortes sur Paris. See more, Asher
Ethan Miller, “Autobiography and apes in Meryon ’s ‘Eaux-Fortes sur Paris, ’” Burlington Magazine,
vol. 141, no.1150, p.4.

6’ Eugenia Parry Janis (1986), p.38-39.

6" Dennis Paul Costanzo (1981), p.96.

69 Constance Cain Hungerford “Charles Marville, popular illustrator: The Origin of a Photographic
Sensibility, ” History of Photography, volume 9, no. 3, July-September 1985, p.227

7° Eugenia Parry Janis (1986), pp.48-49.

7‘ Louis-Desire Blanquart-Evrard, Traité de photographic sur papier, quoted from Constance Cain
Hungerford (1985), p.232.

72According to Maria Morris Hambourg, Atget took pictures of architecture and street scenes from 18805
and he was not officially attached to an institution, nor did he work for an agency or distributor. Maria
Morris (1980), p.74. Abbott informed that Atget’s love for old Parisian sites as a photographic subject was
initially encouraged by the playwright, Victorian Sardou. Sardou kept Atget informed of historic sites
scheduled to be demolished. Berenice Abbott (1964), The World of Atget, p.xi.

73 It is not known how Atget acquired this first public commission. Starting the sale on 2“d of October,

1899, to the Museé Camavalet, the city’s history museum, Atget regularly sold to the Bibliotheque
historique de la Ville de Paris, the Bibliothéque Nationale, the Bibliothéque at the Ecole des Beaux-arts,
the Museé de Sculpture C ompareé, Ecole Boulle, and the Bibliothéque at the Union C entrale des Arts
Décoratifs, also called the Bibliotheque de Musée des Arts Décoratifs. Molly Nesbit (1992), p.20.

74Atget’s friend Andre Calmettes considered that this moment was the true beginning of Atget’s
photographic career. In Calmettes’ undated letter to Berenice Abbott, referred in Molly Nesbit (1992), p.20.
5 After the French revolution and Haussmann’s demolitions of Paris, many photographers were called

upon to record changing aspects of French civilization. Particularly the improved images of photography
facilitated the production of various public archives for the government and many public libraries.

7" Edward J. Sozanski, “Atget '5 ‘Art of Old Paris’ is more than a documentary, " Philadelphia Inquirer,
Monday. Oct. 18, 1982.

77 James Borcoman (1984), p.55.

78 Robert A. Sobieszek claims that, despite the contextual issues that conditioned both the making and the
meaning of prints, landscape and topographic photography fi'om about 1850 to about 1880 remains one of
the supreme artistic achievements of the century. Robert A. Sobieszek, “Travel, ” in The Art of
Photography, 1839-1989, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989, p.133.

79 For more, see Dennis Paul Costanzo (198]).

8° James Borcoman (1984), p.38.

8‘ Francoise Heilbrun (1934), p.350.

’2 Approximately 300 paper negatives survive in the Archives Photographiques (depositied at the Musée
d’Orsay); Bayard’s negatives do not appear to have survived. See Michel F rizot, “The Heliographic
Mission, " in A New History of Photography, p.66.

83 Anne de Mondenard, “Mission Héliographique, 185: L ’odyssée des images, ” Connaissance des arts,
no.590, Jan. 2002, p.64.

8‘ Michel Frizot (1998), p.66.

85 The picturesque approach to landscape traces back to 18m-century theories of English garden design and
writings such as Willian Gilpin’s 1786 essays. In France, the picturesque had been popularized by such
projects as the seminal lithographic series Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l ’ancienne France, the
first of whose 19 volumes was published in 1891(the last not until 1878). Constance Cain Hungerford
(1985), p.230

‘6 Constance Cain Hungerford (1985), p.230.

’7 Abigail Solomon-Godeau sees that the standard of commissional work were derived essentially rules for
the organization of pictorial space in Painting was due as much as to the number of photographers with

71

 

training in the traditional fine arts as the fact that the battle to legitimize photography was waged on
psainting’s term. Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Photography at the Dock, p.
Donald Lee Neal (1978), p.27.

89 Atget, Géniaux, Vert, Petits Métiers et Types Parisiens vers 1900, Musée Camavalet, 6 Nov 1984-13
Jan 1985, p.48.
9° Francoise Heilbrun (1934), p.355.
9‘ Molly Nesbit (1992), p.65. Both institutions held substantial collections of the topographical work of
Charles Marville at that time. It was possible to guess that Atget saw Marville work. Another source says
that in 1899 the chief librarian at the Bibliotheque Historique hired a commercial photographer to restore
and print the roughly four hundred Marville negatives in the library’s collection. So the freshly reprinted
Marville material was often laid out on the library’s table, and this period is when Atget had frequently
visited the place. Whatever cases, considering the fact that Marville’s work was not often appeared in the
periodicals of the time, it seemed clear that Atget was well aware of Marville works through the visits of

ublic institutions. Colin Westerbeck and Joel Meyerowitz (1994), p. 108.

2 According to Marie De Thezy, his photographs of the sculptures housed in the Louvre were described as
“first-class prints,” and his pictures of the Imperial Prince’s baptism are said to be “exquisitely precise.”
His small-scale photographs of country scenes, exhibited in London 1862, were described as being “the
most complete in the exhibition: they have a harmonious aspect that is not found elsewhere.” The editor of
La Lumiere was just as enthusiastic: 1 wish 1 could describe how beautiful this work is. He has achieved the
most surprising results.”

Marie De Thezy, “Charles Marville, Photographer of Paris between 1851-1879,” (in) Charles Marille,
Eastern Press, lnc.: New York, 1981 p.66

93 While Atget reacted against the whole sale renovation of Paris, Marville’s photographs of Old Paris were
intended to complement the work of transformation is clear not only from the work but also from an
exchange of letters now in the Archives of the Camavalet Museum. For more on these letters, see Maria
Morris Hambourg, “Charles Marville’s Old Paris,” (in) Charles Marville, 1981, pp.10-11.

9“ This is an unearthly point of view, higher than a man stands yet not superior to the building it studies. It
would be a God’s-eye view, if god were an architect. It is also the point of view found in contemporary
elevations and presentation drawings done at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where the ideal way of

representing buildings was taught. Colin Westerbeck and Joel Meyerowitz (1994), pl 13.

95 The “Répertoire” was part of the collection sold by Calmettes to Berenice Abbott. It is now in the Atget
Archives at the Museum of Modern Art.

9" “information et nouvelle,” La Revue des Beaux-Arts, no.98 (February 6. 1892), p.30. Recite from Maria
Morris Hambourg (1980), p.57.

97The earliest date of entry is October, 1900. Molly Nesbit (1992), p.5

9" In the 18905 such art Journal as Die Kunst F ur Alle or Art Journal provided an enormous wealth of
photographic study models for artists. This market was dominated mainly by nude studies, most of which
were collotypes, which could be produced quite cheaply. For more information on this commercial market,
see Ulrich Pohlmann, “Another Nature; or, Arsenals of Memory: Photography as Study Aid, 1850-1900, ”
in The Artist and the Camera, Degas to Picasso, p.48.

99 Maria Morris (1980), p.315.

10° Gerry Badger, Eugene Atget, London, New York: Phaidon, 2001, p.27 .

’0‘ Peter Galassi, “ Caillebotte ’s Space, " in Gustave Caillebotte, New Haven: Yale University Press,

1976, p.25

"’2 Berenice Abbott(l964), The world of Atget, p.20.

103 This was first suggested by John Rewald, in 1935; see Les Sites Cézanniens du pay’s d’Aix:
Hommage a John Rewald, Paris: Reunion des Musée Granet et de l’oeuvre de Cézanne, 1996, p.19. See
also Pavel Machotka, Cézanne: Landscape into Art, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996, Van
Deren Coke, The Painter and the Photographs, exh. cat. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,
1964, p.10.

‘0’ Pavel Machotka, Cezanne: Landscape into Art, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996, p.138.
Quote in French Landscape, The Modern Vision, 1880-1920, New York: The Museum of Modern Art,
1999, p.38.

72

 

‘05 We could not find any sources to connect two artists. However, it is meaningful to know that Atget’s use
of architectural motifs as compositional devices happened right after the retrospective exhibition of
Cézanne in 1895 and 1898.

'06 Maria Morris Hambourg, “The Structure of the Work,” in The Work of Atget, Vol. III, pp.23.

107 According to Donald Lee Neal, Atget had a structural obsession in making and assembling his
photographs. Donald Lee Neal, The sequential Photographs of Eugene Atget, M.A. Thesis, The
University of New Mexico, 1978, p.43.

‘08 See Elizabeth Anne McCauIey, A.A.E. Disdéri and the Carte de Visit Portrait Photography, New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985.

'09 Francis Frith, “The Art of Photography,” The Art Journal, no. 5, 1859, pp.71-2. Quoted in Hehnut and
Alison Gersheim, The History of Photography from the Earliest use of the Camera Obscura in the
Eleventh Century up to 1914, London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1955, p.220.

”0 The seascape tradition in France traced back to the 18th century and had been continued earlier in the
nineteenth century by the Le Havre artist Boudin, and the Barbizon School painter Charles Francois
Daubigny. As Atget’s contemporary, George Seurat undertook several paintings of marine subjects in the
end of 1880. See Magdalena Dabrowski, French Landscape, The Modern Vision, 1880-1920, New York:
The Museum of Modern Art, 1999, p.58-61.

”1 According to Maria Morris Hambourg, the painter Georges Maroniez commissioned Atget to go to
Boulogne to make unposed studies of sailors sometime before 1892, perhaps the seascapes of Boulogne
and Etaples were taken at that time. See Maria Morris Hambourg(l983), The Work of Atget: Old France,
Vol.1, p.175.

“2 Maria Morris Hambourg(l983), The Work of Atget: The Ancien Regime, vol. III, p. 12.

”3 A central issue in the photographic debate concerned sharp versus sofi focus —the straight versus the
pictorial- as an article of faith. This polemic started with publication in 1889 of Naturalistic Photography
for Student for the Art by the Englishman Peter Henry Emerson, who felt strongly that the modern
photographer should as a rule adopt soft focus. Emerson cited Herman von Helmholtz’s theories of
perception-according to which human perception itself is not entirely consistent, but tends to be blurred in
areas of the field of vision- and he vehemently rejected the montage approach of Robinson and Reijlander
which he considered artificial, Willfried Baatz, “Pictorialism around 1900, " in Photography, All
illustrated historical overview, New York: Barron’s Educational Series, lnc., 1997, p.70.

”4 Tribunal de Commerce, Seine (7 March 1861) recited fi'om Bernard Edelman, Ownership of the
Image: Elements for a Marxist Theory of Law, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979, p.46.

“5 According to her, there were also seven smaller groupings of photographs called sub-series. Sometimes
subvseries grew directly out of series and continues to depend fi'om them; others were independently
conceived. Maria Morris (1980), p. 106.

”61bid, p.115.

”7 Francoise Reynaud, Atget, Géniaux, Vert: Petits Métiers et Types Parisiens vers 1900, Paris: Musée
Camavalet, 1984.

”8 Walker Evans, “The reappearance of Photography, " Hound and Horn, Jan-Mar, 1931.

”9 Guillaume Le Gall (2002), p.39.

12° I was greatly stimulated by reading Kirk Vamedoe’s two articles and Peter Galassi’s book Before
Photography and convinced by the premises of the sources. They concern photography’s evolution within
larger traditions of perspectival and optical picture making. For more, see Kirk Vamedoe, “T he Artifice of
Candor: Impressionism and Photography, ” in Perspectives on Photography, pp.99-123, “The ideology of
time: Degas and Photography, " Art in America, vol.68, no.6, summer 1980, pp.96-110. Peter Galassi,
Before Photography: Painting and the invention of Photography, New York: Museum of Modern Art,
1981.

121 Allen Sekula (1978), “Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary, " in Photography: Current
Perspectives, edited by J. Liebling, New york: Light Impressions Co. p.85.

73

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