Page 19 - Studio International - December 1971

Atget Between 1898, when he became a photographer to talk about an entity called Atget if one has not
at the age of forty-one and his death in 1927, had the opportunity to inspect at least the greater
and the city I Eugene Atget made literally thousands of part of what he did ? I think that one can, and I
photographs of Paris and its environs.' He was propose to engage in some fairly substantial
John Fraser unquestionably one of the supreme twentieth generalizations about his work—more substantial
century artists in any visual medium, he was one and more complex ones than have been
of the most heroic, and the image of him going attempted so far.4
out indomitably year after year under the Actually the undertaking is by no means so
`dreadful weight' 2 of his old-fashioned camera, rash as it may seem. True, to judge from one or
wooden tripod, and glass photographic plates is two surprises in the last few years, there may
An exhibition of 118 photographs by Eugène Atget
as compelling to the imagination and deserves to well be pictures still to come that are as great as
will be shown at the ICA, London, 18 December-
be as well known as those of Van Gogh and any by Atget that we now have in print. It is
23 January 1972. This has been selected by the
Cezanne in the grip of their comparable particularly tantalizing, for example, to read of
Museum of Modern Art, New York, from its
obsessions with locales. What is more to the his 'hundreds' of photographs of trees and
collection. Many of the photographs are in the
point, so does his work. Yet the very abundance flowers5 and to have to imagine what his brothel
collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.
of that work, given the fact of his genius, can series is like on the basis of half-a-dozen
In this article on the great photographer (first have an intimidating effect on the would-be exteriors and one magnificent nude. (Is it in the
published in the Cambridge Quarterly, summer critic of it, at least if he suffers from a scholarly latter series, for instance, that one finds the
1968), the author concludes that photography conscience. Only about five hundred different picture of 'a negress which irresistibly recalls
has been slighted as an art-form, and that the
pictures by Atget out of those several thousand Gauguin' ?6) But the very fact that Atget worked
achievements of the finest photographers equal or to have been reproduced in books and periodicals, so much in terms of series —Miss Berenice
surpass those of the finest twentieth-century and the editor of one of those books has Abbott, the preserver of many of Atget's
painters.
declared that `Atget's complete work has not pictures, his most helpful commentator, and his
yet undergone thorough scholarly scrutiny, best editor, reports that there are twenty-five in
and this immense store of visual source material ally —is reassuring. Atget, says Mr Arthur D.
for history, art and architecture remains almost Trottenberg,
untapped.'3 Can one, then, reasonably offer `took almost no isolated photographs. He treated
i Female nude on bed