Page 22 - Studio International - December 1971

pictures, the cobblestones and flagstones
themselves whose lines if projected forwards
would pass a foot or two below one's own feet,
and hence subliminally draw one's attention to
them correctively." Furthermore, not only the
streets themselves but the users of them get
vitalized by the lens in a number of important
pictures. In one of the best known, in which an
itinerant lampshade-seller is posed in the
middle of a sloping cobbled street, the surface
of the street seems to flow down to and past the
observer, and one of the vendor's professionally
indispensable legs, ending in a slipper whose
texture contrasts ironically with the hardness
of the cobbles, is also elongated toward the
observer, so that the man appears to be half in
motion and at work even while standing still.
(See too the poignant and perhaps even finer
picture of a boy flower-seller thrusting his
wares towards the camera [V98].) The same
effect of movement occurs with the slightly
elongated wheels of most of the parked
vehicles—cabs, buses, delivery carts, and so on
—that Atget photographed in close-up; and a
number of those vehicles get further vitalized
by seeming to extend out of the frame towards
one, so that one's consciousness of them as
potential transporters of oneself or of things
that one might be interested in becomes
intensified.
And the centrality of the city streets and of
movement on them, thus dramatized, points
one straight towards the centre of Atget's
apprehension of the city as a whole. It wasn't,
I judge, simply a quest for picturesqueness, or
a need for well-lit models, or even a professional
empathy, that led him to take a whole series of
pictures of street-vendors in his first year as a
photographer (it is one of his greatest series);
and it seems to me fitting that the four that
have been the most often reproduced should be
those of a bakery woman with her cart, the
lampshade-seller, an umbrella merchant, and
an organ-grinder and his singer—caterers,
respectively, to the need for food, light, shelter,
and entertainment. I am suggesting that what 2 Tablemaker
drew Atget to the vendors in the first place was
3 Lampshade pedlar, Paris c. 1910
an intuitive perception of them as agents and
embodiments of vital city processes that he was
to go steadily deeper into. Human essentials
being made available for consumption, waiting
to be handled, chosen, used in the public
places provided or carried away through the
streets into rooms like those into which his
camera penetrated—it is the drama of the city's
bounty and plenitude that stands out above all
in Atget's finest work, and it is a drama that is
at once physical and spiritual. As Mr
Trottenberg has well said, 'the bittersweet
nostalgia so obvious in the work of... Atget is
not primarily directed to buildings, streets and
parks. It is, rather, concerned with the
pulsation of life in a city which once had time
to nourish its inhabitants in more meaningful
relationships than obtain today.'21 Let me try
to define that pulsation. It is not altogether a
simple matter.

234