Eugene Atget Appreciation

koraks said:

I think it's lopsided, unbalanced, awkward and overall unfortunately framed

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Well, that photo crops to this:


which, oddly, is none of the things you mention. It's a bit weird that he had to position the camera off kilter to the "librairie" part at the top and the sides are all wonky - but this crop has nice horizontals and verticals with the angles of the stairs complementing each other, and that nice subtle illumination at the top.

Maybe he needed a Hassselblad...

As usual, this photo leaves me undecided about Atget. I spent a few minutes wondering how else one might have taken it. There is a charm to its wonkiness, which would be lost if it was taken perfectly straight - that would be boring. There is a mystery in the fact that we can’t tell whether this was a bookseller or a library (depending whether the penultimate letter is an I or a T) - but that is probably accidental. There is a beauty in the flights of stairs and the arrangement of shadows and lit areas - but should that be credited to the photographer or to the architect? There is a satisfying beauty in the tones overall, but that is arguably inherent in the medium and the large format, and not something we can credit to Atget. In sum, as with many of Atget’s photos, I appreciate it, and find it bears repeated viewing, but I’m not convinced that it reflects any great artistry on the part of Atget. And yet, when I consider how often I am in this quandary over Atget’s photos, there must be something there, surely?

snusmumriken said:

There is a beauty in the flights of stairs and the arrangement of shadows and lit areas - but should that be credited to the photographer or to the architect?

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We have the photo, with the perspective fixed. So our appreciation is informed by the photographer's choice. But because it is a photo of something, that something will also have a large responsibility for the look of the photo. So - both get credit.

snusmumriken said:

And yet, when I consider how often I am in this quandary over Atget’s photos, there must be something there, surely?

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Historical significance, for one. And his images help feed our present-day nostalgia of a Paris that we think has existed, although nobody presently alive can literally imagine it accurately.

Mind you, I'm in no way desiring to take a p*ss on Atget or his work - but if this is about composition, I'm just not seeing it. Of course, when it comes to compositionally balanced images, we're spoiled for choice. Within the realm of photography, it was different in Atget's time - both the combined body of work and the accessibility.

Don and Koraks - Atget got it right, at least for Atget. A degree of quirkiness was inherent to the composition. It had to feel right to him, not resemble a view camera manual showing the correct application of architectural alignment movements. His "as is" image is richer. The "Librairie" sign actually is somewhat detached from the building and loosely slanted downward. That keys into some of the other diagonals in the scene and accentuates them, but in a somewhat unpredictable "non-boring" manner. It also lends a more authentic cultural feel to the scene, which was one of Atget's priorities. I appreciate the image.

DREW WILEY said:

Don and Koraks - Atget got it right, at least for Atget. A degree of quirkiness was inherent to the composition. It had to feel right to him, not resemble a view camera manual showing the correct application of architectural alignment movements. His "as is" image is richer. The "Librairie" sign actually is somewhat detached from the building and loosely slanted downward. That keys into some of the other diagonals in the scene and accentuates them, but in a somewhat unpredictable "non-boring" manner. It also lends a more authentic cultural feel to the scene, which was one of Atget's priorities. I appreciate the image.

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Totally agree.

Nothing wrong with the composition, here. On the contrary. We see what Atget saw, what anybody walking in front of 28, rue Bonaparte, would have seen.

As Drew mentions, the image itself is entirely in line with Atget's photographic intent. When looking at Atget, we are looking at old photographs of old Paris—a Paris that in Atget's time was disappearing, or in decay.

That's what interested him, as he stated in 1920: “… I have assembled photographic glass negatives… in all the old streets of Old Paris, artistic documents showing the beautiful civil architecture from the 16th to the 19th century. The old mansions, historic or interesting houses, beautiful façades, lovely doors, beautiful panelling, door knockers, old fountains, stylish staircases (wrought iron and wood) and interiors of all the churches in Paris… This enormous documentary and artistic collection is now finished. I can say that I possess the whole of Old Paris.”

This bookstore was opened by Leroux in 1871, meaning that at the time Atget photographed it, it was either closed, or soon to close (the photo was taken in 1910, Ernest Leroux died in 1917). It used to be pretty famous, as it specialized in oriental art books at a time when orientalism was quite the rage, as well as archeology and philosophy. It had certainly lost by then its glory, as witnessed by the crooked "Library" sign and the tilted tiles. Straightening it all up for the sake of "composition" would have made absolutely no sense for Atget, nor cropping out the Library sing.

We get here exactly what Atget was after: a clearly old, disappearing landmark of Paris, and yet, beautiful craftmanship in the architecture — notaceably the stairs and how the light plays with shadows as the day progresses.

Atget must also have liked the addition of the sign advertising "Clichés", available from Mr Limon on the 2nd floor. Sellers of clichés back then were printers specialised in reproductions, but the word was already used to mean both a photograph and, pejoratively, a lieu commun.

By not straightening everything up and by showing us what is as is, Atget was producing anything but a cliché.

Alex Benjamin said:

straightening everything up

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DREW WILEY said:

not resemble a view camera manual showing the correct application of architectural alignment movements

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My issue is not with the lack of 'straightening everything up' etc. I just don't see how this particular composition works. Or, I should really say: it just doesn't work for me. It gives me a queasy feeling in the stomach and the sense of the left side of my body slumping. I don't 'get' the balance (or rather, in my view lack thereof) between the dark and the light areas. Interesting things are happening content-wise in the photograph, but there's no clear subject in a graphic sense. There's no clear internal logic to the image as such. It's just a jumbled bunch of lines and surfaces.

Yes, I understand that the photograph may be successful in the sense of a historical document, a recording of the 'thing' that was, at that moment. But as an artwork in itself, I don't find it successful in the least. We were supposed to 'keep looking' at the shadow ratios, lack of level etc. - and my point is that even if I look several times, for an extended period of time, the image as such fails to work for me. Again, as a document of a particular spot in a city that has once been - yes, sure. As a photograph in its own right - nope, and if it would be in a gallery or exhibition, I'd not stop to look at it, frankly.

Wow, I'm so pleased that others understand and express better in words that I'm unable to explain.

So let me get this straight, because I don't get it. Do you think this is a successful photograph as such, or do you like the subject matter and is the photograph nothing more than the necessary document that allows you to see it?

DREW WILEY said:

The "Librairie" sign actually is somewhat detached from the building and loosely slanted downward.

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I'm not convinced the sign is hanging at all. It looks to me as though the letters are painted directly on the facade, which is probably concrete or render because there is a waste pipe running through it at the top right.

Alex Benjamin said:

By not straightening everything up and by showing us what is as is, Atget was producing anything but a cliché.

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What makes you sure that this was deliberate? Maybe he was just in a hurry? Maybe he had kicked the tripod just before exposure, and didn't realise until he developed the plate? Maybe he had no choice over viewpoint and insufficient movements in his camera to correct the perspective.

While he was certainly photographing the building as it was in his time, the skewing of the image is not documentary, it's a photographic artefact. Arguably it adds to the intended atmosphere, but it seems far from certain that it was a deliberate effect.

I just get a feel for what he was doing, and why. Never underestimate Atget. Sure, he did an awful lot of seemingly random stock photography or "documents", street-wise. The exhibition examples have been culled out of a much larger quantity of images, and must have specially caught else's someone's eye too, just as they are. The seeming imbalance, top to bottom, works superbly. It's deliberately upsetting, yet in a very effective composition sense. It draws you into all the interplay of the angle in a way a more "ideal" rendering wouldn't.
I could say more, but gotta go help unload my wife's groceries at the moment.

koraks said:

So let me get this straight, because I don't get it. Do you think this is a successful photograph as such, or do you like the subject matter and is the photograph nothing more than the necessary document that allows you to see it?

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The first time I looked at Atget’s images, I thought WTF is going on. Sometimes he just photographs a bush with a bit of wall in the background. I believe when Berenice Abbott fist showed some of Atget’s work to Alfred Stieglitz he was not impressed. I have shown Atget images to many students who often think it’s crap, but when you sit with his images and really absorb yourself in his work, you start to get it. Like moving into another dimension of aesthetics in time. For me, he is the Van Gough of photography.

koraks said:

there's no clear subject in a graphic sense

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I agree. But that's because "things age and fall apart" is about as far a subject you can get "in a graphic sense". But if you look at the photograph as the reprensentation of something that is old, i.e., of something that once was new, you see what Atget saw, his now (the old) and its past, that is, graphically speaking, the beautiful symmetry that once was, and how it plays with both diagonals and the mystery of light and shadow.

This ambiguous play with time, with present and past, is part of the magic of Atget, a lesson well learned by Walker Evans.

koraks said:

There's no clear internal logic to the image as such.

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It's a photograph of something that was there, in the world. There is no clear (visual) internal logic in what is in the world.

koraks said:

I understand that the photograph may be successful in the sense of a historical document, a recording of the 'thing' that was, at that moment. But as an artwork in itself, I don't find it successful in the least.

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There's no difference between the two for Atget. That's why he called his photographs "artistic documents".

The document is capturing these old objects and landmarks of Paris' past as they were then. The "art" comes from the craftmanship.

snusmumriken said:

the skewing of the image is not documentary

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The image isn't skewed. If you look at most diagonals, you see it's actually pretty straight. It's elements in the scene that are skewed. And not all of them skewed in the same direction.

For these reasons, this photo must have been quite a challenge for him. He could have said This is all skewed, makes no sense graphically speaking, I'm moving on. But no. He cared enough to set up the camera and tripod, and tried to find a way to make it make sense, to make it somewhat harmonious even though things are skewed left and right and up and down.

He could have framed it like Don's crop — which, I suspect, a lot of us would have done. But this would have left the sign out. But he decided to give us just enough of the straight side walls to give us a sense of how much things are falling apart (compare the two poles holding the sign: the right one is straight, it's the left one that has given in).

But in order for the viewer not to be totally attracted (or rather, distracted) by all that is skewed, he puts smack in the middle of the photograph the only thing that is stable, that graphically "makes sense", that is, the engraved makings of the name of the editor and the second store cliché shop—a whole element which, by the way, looks like a tombstone. From that center you "see" the symmetry that was. If you start there, the picture makes sense.

snusmumriken said:

What makes you sure that this was deliberate? Maybe he was just in a hurry? Maybe he had kicked the tripod just before exposure, and didn't realise until he developed the plate?

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If you're walking around Paris carrying an 8x10 camera, plates, tripod, etc., you're never in a hurry. Moreover, he lived in Paris. If he had made a mistake like kicking his tripod before exposure, he would have come back another day. Don't forget he was 53 years old when he took this picture. He knew what he was doing.

As I said, this is a tough and challenging picture to take — koraks is right in saying it makes no sense graphically, but it's the scene that makes no sense, it's the scene that's very difficult to organize visually in order for it to make sense as a photograph. Atget was obviously interested in it, and I like his solution to the visual problems it poses. What I'd be curious to know is if there was more than one negative, i.e., if he tried other solutions and, in the end, decided this was the "best" one, the closest he would come to solving this visual problem.

It's very difficult to say just how much in any Atget image can be attributed to methodical calculation, and how much to sheer instinct and previous experience. No doubt some of both, overall. In this particular case, he's not alive to interview, and probably wouldn't know exactly what to say himself. The point is, it worked. There are many times our own intuition is way more effective than any "how to" rules of composition handbook.

Trying to get into Atget's head is like trying to get into Van Gogh's. They both felt things, intensely.

I would also point out the inbuilt contrast between the bold lettering on the overhead sign and the intimate lettering lower down. One pushes you backward, the other draws you in forward. Atget was a master at that kind of visual plane push-pull, using multiple compositional strategies in his overall work. We color photographers can use warm/cold hue distinctions to do it. I was obsessed with picture plane complexities in my early color work. Atget employed not only counter-details like lettering in this case, but converging and diverging angles, atmospheric depth, wide angle lens distortion, reflections, etc, not to mention psychological overtones. The manner he managed to so intuitively juggle all these aspects has never been surpassed.

DREW WILEY said:

It's very difficult to say just how much in any Atget image can be attributed to methodical calculation, and how much to sheer instinct and previous experience. No doubt some of both, overall. In this particular case, he's not alive to interview, and probably wouldn't know exactly what to say himself. The point is, it worked. There are many times our own intuition is way more effective than any "how to" rules of composition handbook.

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Totally agree. But to the mix of experience and intuition, I would also add a dash of boldness, or daring, which is the ability to say "hey, why not!" at these times when either your experience or intuition (or both) says "nah, it'll never work".

Alex Benjamin said:

But he decided to give us just enough of the straight side walls to give us a sense of how much things are falling apart (compare the two poles holding the sign: the right one is straight, it's the left one that has given in)

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Those aren’t poles holding a sign board, they are external rain or waste-water pipes, most likely cast-iron. Hence why they wriggle to join up with other parts of the system that emerge out of the walls and have different diameter. It’s old fashioned, but durable, so plenty of buildings in France and the UK still have such pipes. In this photo they look to be in good repair, not decayed.

snusmumriken said:

Those aren’t poles holding a sign board, they are external rain or waste-water pipes, most likely cast-iron.

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My nomenclature was wrong. Doesn't change the point I was making.

snusmumriken said:

Maybe he had no choice over viewpoint and insufficient movements in his camera to correct the perspective.

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Many many of his images show that he used a lens that had insufficient coverage for the plate size; note the arched shadowing on each upper corner.

Just like photographers before and after him, Atget sometimes employed the corner falloff of the lens to his creative advantage. But unlike many, he lent an elegance to it. He certainly wasn't gear obsessed.

Alex Benjamin said:

My nomenclature was wrong. Doesn't change the point I was making.

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But it does, Alex, because those things are not falling apart, so Atget has not subtly emphasized decay by including them.

All the attempts to somehow beatify his work don't seem to work very well for me. I can't shake the thought that most of the argumentation I'm reading is highly tautological. Atget's photos are supposed to be good because they're Atget's.

As far as I'm concerned, his photos as works of art in and of themselves, disregarding the subject matter for a bit, are hit and miss and often mediocre. What makes them interesting, valuable and also (personally speaking) enjoyable to look at, is the subject matter. When viewing Atget's photos, I appreciate a romantic idyll of 18th-19th century French urban architecture. It's charming. The body of work as such is unique in its attempt to catalog the city. Viewed one by one, though, his photographs are hit & miss from a compositional viewpoint and often not particularly noteworthy. Which, IMO, is the case here.

Don't get me wrong, I think Atget's work is terribly interesting and important. But I also think it's sometimes appreciated for entirely the wrong reasons. But hey, there's no accounting for taste.

Incidentally, someone found the place and took a photo of it in 2017



The "Librairie" text is gone but it looks mostly the same. managed to stand such that nothing was wonky in the photo, also. But there may have been something in the way of setting the camera up in the best location - who knows. Not taking a fully perpendicular perspective also may have been an attempt to add depth. There's a flatness to the image I just linked.

Maybe there is a lot of "they're good because they're Atget's" going on - some of the defence of that Librairie photo is bordering on ludicrous. But there are many, many excellent Atget photos, just assessed from fairly mundane ideas of "good composition". It doesn't take much effort to recognize that.

Subject matter also doesn't choose itself. So, whatever is interesting about the subject is also due to where the photographer pointed the camera. This is a photo of a statue:



Atget didn't make the statue but did choose the perspective of this photo. You don't get to walk around it. There is a real distinction between the real object in the world and it's representation in a photo as a subject.

Don_ih said:

Incidentally, someone found the place and took a photo of it in 2017

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The "Librairie" text is gone but it looks mostly the same. managed to stand such that nothing was wonky in the photo, also. But there may have been something in the way of setting the camera up in the best location - who knows. Not taking a fully perpendicular perspective also may have been an attempt to add depth. There's a flatness to the image I just linked.

Maybe there is a lot of "they're good because they're Atget's" going on - some of the defence of that Librairie photo is bordering on ludicrous. But there are many, many excellent Atget photos, just assessed from fairly mundane ideas of "good composition". It doesn't take much effort to recognize that.

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That's fascinating, thanks for posting that link.

Don_ih said:

Subject matter also doesn't choose itself. So, whatever is interesting about the subject is also due to where the photographer pointed the camera.

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Additionally, a photographer typically has control over which images of his chosen subjects he cares to show. I believe I'm right in saying that Atget never had the opportunity to say "These are my best photographs of things I cared about; but these others are mere pot boilers taken just for the sake of having an image of the thing." I think that leads to even more "They're good because they're Atget's" in his case than with other famous people.

koraks said:

All the attempts to somehow beatify his work don't seem to work very well for me. I can't shake the thought that most of the argumentation I'm reading is highly tautological. Atget's photos are supposed to be good because they're Atget's.

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Don_ih said:

some of the defence of that Librairie photo is bordering on ludicrous.

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koraks said:

I also think it's sometimes appreciated for entirely the wrong reasons. But hey, there's no accounting for taste.

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Just to be clear: I'm not trying to beatify—nor beautify—this work, nor "defend" the photo, and even less declare that it's "good" when it should be "bad". I'm trying to see how Atget saw, and understand how he thought as a photographer—not as one, like us, who has the knowledge of nearly a hundred years of photography since he died and whose concept of what is "composition" is informed by that knowledge, but as a photographer in 1910, with very little photographic history behind him, but with a fascinating, interesting and novel approach to the medium and what he wants to do with it. And that's a huge part of why Atget is admired and appreciated, especially if you add the great craftsmanship with which he did it. It has nothing to do with taste.

To me, the photo is neither "good" nor "bad". What I think about the photo, my opinion of it—is it good, is it bad, is it "well composed", etc.—is irrelevant and uninteresting, and, paradoxically, has little to do with appreciation. These categories are relevant only if trying to judge a photo, not when trying, objectively, to understand the photographer, and trying to understand why he took this photo, and why he took it the way he took it. Am I right? I don't know. One never does when one is trying to understand.

Alex Benjamin said:

I'm trying to see how Atget saw, and understand how he thought as a photographer

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Me too. My conclusion is that it went something like this:
"Hmm, that corner is nice with the staircases and the sign over it. Too bad about the cart full of horse manure against this wall; I'd have liked to be able to take one or two steps back. Ah well, let's just frame it a little tight and see how it pans out. Mr. Serviette who likes to buy this kind of scene from me can always frame it a little wider, using his imagination to fill in the gaps."

Alex Benjamin said:

my opinion of it—is it good, is it bad, is it "well composed", etc.—is irrelevant and uninteresting, and, paradoxically, has little to do with appreciation.

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Sure, but the whole thing started by the statement that we should look really closely with the implication that we were to appreciate something that I frankly still don't see, after having revisited the image several times over the course of several days.

I wouldn't have made any more of it than the pragmatic approach I guessed at above, if not there was a suggestion in this thread that there's more to the image than meets the (my) eye.