Page 21 - Studio International - December 1971

doing, and a sense of distance results. When have, not excluding Edward Weston's.) There virtually all other major photographers have
Atget himself, even, takes a candid photograph is indeed something peculiarly compelling used. I strongly suspect that he may have
of a horse-drawn omnibus at rest with two or about Atget's city streets that seems to place received the impulsion towards it from Van
three men on top, the conductor fiddling with the viewer in them almost physically, and I Gogh's work, 19 especially since I suspect that
some mechanism, and a bystander lighting a believe that it is intimately related to his he may also have received from Van Gogh the
cigarette,18 one's reaction almost inevitably is, technical means. As I suggested above, there impulsion to document a whole region in
`Ah, a bit of Old Paris ... quaintness ... la belle is every reason to suppose that Atget used the depth, a sense of the rich significance of the
époque ...' and so on, rather than the immediate particular camera that he did because it suited `everyday', and a tendency to polarize things
kinaesthetic sensation that here is an object that him, 'faults' and all; and the most immediately into either scenes empty of people yet richly
one might at any moment climb aboard oneself obvious of those faults are of course the tilting redolent of them, or posed studies of
or that, like Stieglitz's superb Fifth Avenue of the ground plane and exaggerated representative individuals. But whatever the
one, might knock one down if one doesn't step foreshortening that the lens produced. At cause, the effect is a continual vitalization of
back on to the sidewalk. Normally, however, it times the distortion is quite wild; at others it is the walking areas that he presents —those
is precisely such a sense of the kinaesthetic and almost unnoticeable; but it is there to a greater sombre courtyards diminishing sharply away
tactile that Atget gives us with unsurpassed or lesser extent in many of the street scenes from one, only to open up again with a doorway
brilliance, and especially with regard to the that I have looked at, and there seems to me or staircase or a tunnel-like opening offering a
activities I named at the start of this paragraph. no doubt whatever that it was essential to glimpse of sunlit street beyond; those streets
Let me give an example. Atget's way of seeing. What he got with it was narrowing sharply away after their openings
It isn't, I judge, mere chance that one of the sensation of things advancing, receding, have been punched dramatically in facades
Atget's best-known pictures should be of a and moving to left and right of one in a way viewed more or less at right angles, or shooting
cheap boot or boot-repair store with several kinaesthetically closer to normal seeing than up or downhill; those interminable quais; and
rows of boots displayed on shelves outside it occurs with the so-called 'normal' lenses that most important of all, perhaps, in a number of
(V24, A7, C33). The picture is in fact one of 2
those characteristically subtle ones of his, of
which I shall be giving a number of examples
in the course of this paper, in which the eye is
immediately drawn to one feature ('What a
funny lot of shiny boots !') but in which all the
features in reality interact as natural symbols or
epitomizations. The leather of the boots is
supple and highly polished, bringing irresistibly
into one's consciousness the feet walking in
them and the hands shining them. Below them
are the worn-looking stones of the sidewalk.
Resting on that sidewalk side by side at one
end of the shelves and reinforcing the sense of
muscular effort with hands and feet are a
cumbersome pair of wooden clogs and a
battered garbage pail with the lid slightly off.
At the other end of the shelves is a chair. And
glimpsed through the one small window of the
store is what is presumably the white-bearded
and be-capped owner of the store quietly eating
his lunch. The subtle evocations of movement
and rest are so thoroughly and naturally a part
of the objects that to introduce the term symbol
here at all, with its by now almost inescapable
connotations of over-ingeniously imposed
abstractions, seems almost like an act of
treachery. But the facts are that Atget does
again and again work in terms of the
juxtapositions of natural symbols and that the
total effect in the boots picture is a simultaneous
apprehension both of the lives of other people
animating those boots and thousands of pairs
like them, and of one's own shod feet upon the
sidewalks.
As I said, it seems to me not mere chance
that a picture so central to the city experience
—and especially to the pre-1914 city experience,
as aline's Mort a Credit testifies—should have
lodged itself in the minds of admirers of Atget,
just as it isn't merely chance that Atget should
be represented so exclusively by his urban
pictures in brief samplings from his work. (It
is still far from a commonplace that some of
his nature photographs are as great as any we

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