Eugène Atget

Atget photgraped the city of Paris and its environs for almost thirty years, from 1898 - 1927.

Aperture Masters of Photography : Eugène Atget

Museum of Modern Art (New York, N.Y.)

John Szarkowski

Revered photographer John Szarkowski draws from an exquisite selection entirely from his collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and discusses each photograph with intelligence and humor in the clear and entirely accessible language for which he is known. 100 tritone photos.

Atget

Andreas Krase

Hans-Christian Adam

Eugene Atget roamed the streets with his bulky large format camera, systematically cataloguing turn-of-the-century Old Paris down to the very smallest details. His skilled, wonderfully atmospheric photos of Paris's parks, buildings, streets, store windows, prostitutes, workers, and even door handles are a joy to behold. This abbreviated volume contains a selection of Atget's best photographs and is the perfect introduction to this master photographer's work.

Atget's Paris

Gerry Badger

Eugene Atget is today seen as the first 'modern' photographer. He was a compulsive documenter of all things Parisian. Day after day, for over 30 years, he systematically photographed Parisian street scenes, street trades (from rag-pickers to prostitutes) and the grand parks of Saint-Cloud and Versailles. He himself described his work as simple 'documents for artists' but since his death in 1927, his work has been re-evaluated and he is now seen as one of the most important photographers of the twentieth century, the creator of a unique monument to a Paris that no longer exists and a particular era of French culture.

Five Great Innovators of Photography

Maria Morris Hambourg

The Work of Atget

David Campany

Pierre MacOrlan

Text by David Campany, Pierre Mac Orlan, Jeffrey Ladd.

Eugene Atget Photographe de Paris

Books on Books 1

J. Paul Getty Museum

Gordon Baldwin

Publisher Fact Sheet Featuring details of often-inconspicuous buildings, side streets, cul-de-sacs, & public sculptures in his beloved Paris. Includes commentary on each image.

Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum

Josiane Sartre

Suzanne Tise-Isoré

Bibliothèque des arts décoratifs (Paris, France)

"Eugene Atget is renowned as one of the greatest photographers of the turn of the twentieth century. From 1898 onwards, he began to record, methodically, an urban yet intimate Paris as seen through the city's streets, its hotels particuliers, shops, fountains, and churches. His photographs of courtyard doorways, signs, door knockers, balconies, stairway banisters, and carved panels constitute an impressive collection of decorative documents that he made available to artists, institutions, and collectors under the name of Paris pittoresque or L'Art dans le vieux Paris." "Atget captures starkly lit architectural motifs and decorative details, giving them an almost abstract quality, as if they were museum pieces. The 350 photographs selected here reveal this unique perspective, amply demonstrating why Atget's work was to have such an enduring influence on the artistic avant-garde of the twentieth century." "Not surprisingly, Atget's work rapidly caught the interest of the directors of the Bibliotheque des Arts decoratifs in Paris. The Bibliotheque's collection contains no less than 6,000 albumen-mounted photographs, purchased between 1900 and 1926. This book aims to reveal, through this substantial collection, the photographic journey of an artist whose measured, orderly compositions, devoid of human presence, are imbued with a mysterious poetry. The architectural and artistic legacy they present cannot fail, a century later, to seduce and astonish today's viewer."--Jacket

Paris in Detail

Pierre Borhan

Sylvie Aubenas

Luce Lebart

Jean-Claude Lemagny

Hotel de ville (Paris, France)

The works of the great French photographer Eugene Atget (1856-1927) are already internationally known through many books. His role as a highly influential pioneer of photography is less well appreciated. This beautiful new book explores Atget's legacy through his own photographs and those of his successors, names who are themselves legends in the history of the art: Berenice Abbott, Hila and Bernd Becher, Bill Brandt, Robert Doisneau, Walker Evans, Michael Kenna, Lee Friedlander, Clarence John Laughlin, Albert Renger-Patzsch, Rene-Jacques, Bruno Requillard, August Sander. Through a selection of insightful essays and a stunning portfolio of more than 160 photos, Atget's work is juxtaposed with those of later photographers to produce a unique and ground-breaking analysis of a critical strand of photographic history. During his lifetime Atget's work held a fascination for contemporary Surrealist artists such as Man Ray; later Walker Evans drew on Atget's unflinching views of the Paris backstreets to create his own image of urban life, Cubism too found inspiration in the tightly framed spaces of Atget's Parisian streets. Publishing for the first time numerous photographs by Atget - including the newly discovered photos of trees in the park at Saint-Cloud - this book also presents texts by experts in the history of photography.

Atget, the Pioneer

"The Work of Atget: The Art of Old Paris will be published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same title, on view in the West Wing Galleries of The Museum of Modern Art from October 14, 1982 through January 4, 1983. The book is the second of four exploring the art of the French photographer Eugene Atget. Support for The Work of Atget volumes has been generously provided by Springs Industries, Inc. During his lifetime, Atget was best known as a photographer of Old Paris, the subject of this volume. To create his portrait of Paris as it had appeared prior to the French Revolution, he photographed not only the famous sites and monuments--Notre Dame, the Pantheon, and the Luxembourg Palace--but also the little-noticed corners and artifacts that had escaped the urban renewal projects of the 19th century--the quiet courtyards, private town houses, and unexpected passageways. Perhaps no more intimate portrait of Old Paris exists than the one Atget painstakingly fashioned." "A biography of Atget by Mrs. Hambourg forms the text of the 192-page The Art of Old Paris. Drawing on new research, Mrs. Hambourg reveals more fully the life of this hitherto elusive and shadowy artist and offers new insights into his intellectual pursuits and his political and artistic associations. The 117 photographs in the exhibition are reproduced as full-page plates, printed in three color offset to insure the utmost fidelity to the original prints. The plates are fully annotated and accompanied by 95 reference illustrations."--Excerpt from the MoMA press release No. 31 (see link to PDF).

Marcel Proust

The Photographs of Eugène Atget; the Words of Marcel Proust

A Vision of Paris

Alison Nordstrom

Christopher Rauschenberg

Clark Worswick

Rosamond Bernier

Between 1888 and 1927 Eugne Atget meticulously photographed Paris and its environs, capturing in thousands of photographs the city's parks, streets, and buildings as well as its diverse inhabitants. His images preserved the vanishing architecture of the ancien rgime as Paris grew into a modern capital and established Atget as one of the twentieth century's greatest and most revered photographers. Christopher Rauschenberg spent a year in the late '90s revisiting and rephotographing many of Atget's same locations. Paris Changing features seventy-four pairs of images beautifully reproduced in duotone. By meticulously replicating the emotional as well as aesthetic qualities of Atget's images, Rauschenberg vividly captures both the changes the city has undergone and its enduring beauty. His work is both an homage to his predecessor and an artistic study of Paris in its own right. Each site is indicated on a map of the city, inviting readers to follow in the steps of Atget and Rauschenberg themselves. Essays by Clark Worswick and Alison Nordstrom give insight into Atget's life and situate Rauschenberg's work in the context of other rephotography projects. The book concludes with an epilogue by Rosamond Bernier as well as a portfolioof other images of contemporary Paris by Rauschenberg. If a trip to the city of lights is not in your immediate future, this luscious portrait of Paris then and now is definitely the next best thing.

Eugène Atget

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