Through his conversations with artists, he learned that they sometimes used photographs as source materials. Atget decided to provide those source materials. He rose early to bear witness to Paris of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a place of increasing modernization through industrialization, and to reflect those changes in photographs for “real” artists to interpret. His companions were his enormous camera, a wooden tripod, and boxes of glass plates, all of which he carried with him.
Art history provides a bit of narrative luck here: in the twenties, Atget lived a few doors away from the artist Man Ray, who admired his work, which he saw as a product of the “Surrealist impulse.” Man Ray bought prints and got some of them published, but it was the American photographer Berenice Abbott, who was Man Ray’s studio assistant then, who did the lion’s share of putting Atget across. For her, the impact of his work was “immediate and tremendous.” As she wrote in a book that she edited, “The World of Atget” (1964), “There was a sudden flash of recognition—the shock was realism unadorned. The subjects were not sensational, but nevertheless shocking in their very familiarity. The real world, seen with wonderment and surprise, was mirrored in each print.” After Atget’s death, in 1927, she bought thousands of prints and glass negatives from Calmettes, and set about making the work known.
The fifty-odd images in “The Making of a Reputation” are all drawn from the I.C.P.’s holdings. (There is ephemera from other sources.) And though I’m grateful for any opportunity to investigate this essentially mysterious work, which pushes you away even as it pulls you in, I did find myself longing for a more comprehensive view of Atget’s range and influence. Still, what we don’t know about Atget, including much of his basic biography, is what intrigues us about him. He left few personal traces; his life had a ghostly quality that also pervades his photographs, which are full of history’s constructions—buildings, stairways, mannequins, gardens—but seem, for the most part, uninhabited. In another photographer’s hands, Atget’s subjects, which show how thought and vision can work in tandem with emptiness, would likely be only a backdrop to the drama of humanity. (Atget’s work is the antithesis of what Edward Steichen tried to represent with his famously sentimental exhibition “The Family of Man,” in 1955—from which Atget was conspicuously absent.)
I returned to “The Making of a Reputation” on several occasions as a way, I think, of surrendering to that emptiness. Sometimes when looking at a photograph, I’m aware that I am searching for some aspect of myself, or of someone I’ve known. And when I find one, I’m thrilled. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a great image. Part of a photographer’s gift, whether it’s Atget, or Walker Evans, James Van Der Zee, or Diane Arbus, is the ability to accept the fact that a photograph doesn’t solve anything, certainly not when it comes to people. We all have a story to tell, but what is it? Ultimately, Atget’s Paris couldn’t mean a lot to me, given my history with the city, but what did, when I studied such extraordinary works as “Ancien Monastère des Bénédictins anglais, 269 rue Saint-Jacques” (1905) or “Parc Delessert, 32 Quai de Passy” (1914), was his love of it. In the first image, we’re in the lobby of a building, at the foot of a staircase. The light comes from two directions: from above (through a window we cannot see?) and from the rear of the shot, where a window looks out onto a world that is invisible to us. At the center of the second image is a flight of stone steps, framed by a wall and some shrubbery in the foreground. The “drama” in both images is provided by the stairs, which lead somewhere and nowhere. What would you find waiting for you if you climbed the steps? Love or death, or a combination of the two? One image is an interior, one exterior, but Atget printed them with the same kind of burnished, overexposed light, as though they were already fading in memory. (Walter Benjamin compared Atget’s works to crime-scene photographs.)
