Page 24 - Studio International - December 1971

whose broad leaves stretch almost to the edges When I spoke earlier of Atget's greatness as a And if one returns to the city scenes by way of
of the mirror. Five more pots and vases, as well nature photographer, it was a particular group the two city photographs that I have described,
as a lamp and what looks like a figurine, crowd of the nature pictures that I had in mind. To be one can see how it is still fundamentally natural
the mantelpiece; three of them are ornamented sure, there is a distinguished lyrical charm to a energies and processes that are being celebrated
with flowers, the fourth with classical figures in lot of his pictures of the countryside—lanes, there too.
bas-relief. The wallpaper is covered with a fields, woods, lakes, and so on—but the ones in For Atget, as I have suggested, there was no
floral design, the curtain over the fire-place with which his genius is the most apparent are the intrinsic opposition between the heroic and
another, and flowers are painted on an close-ups or near-close-ups of individual trees pastoral on the one hand and the commercial
ornamental pot standing on a ledge to the left and plants, and what especially characterizes on the other. In the picture of the beflowered
of the stove. Four pictures are on the wall. One these is their unmatched evocation of natural room the stress falls entirely on the loving
is a print of fruit lying beside an earthenware energies. Exposed roots surge down banks accumulative energy and orderliness of the
crock; the other three are elegantly framed towards us ; a couple of blossoms, one above room's occupant, rather than on any pathos
photographs of, respectively, two chateaux the other, are shot from so close-to that they latent in his or her multiplying of artistic
and the battlements of a castle. This become mere blurred white contiguous windows opening into unavailable modes of
photograph of Atget's has been reproduced explosions away from dark centres; from a single existence, or any irony in those windows being
only twice, so far as I know. The other—a base among rocks and water four slender trunks so obviously mass-produced and in questionable
close-up of the front of a second-hand shop—is sweep outwards and soar lyrically up and out of taste. Atget, thank heavens, never concerns
much better known (V29, A82, C cover). Two sight, echoed by a fence of saplings in the himself with 'taste' at all. He is concerned
trunks stand on top of each other on the left; background, blurred by light; the massive instead with how things function, and
on the right two hampers stand on top of each triple fork of another tree, bark seething in the objects here are obviously functioning very
other on a very large trunk; cascading down close-up, fills almost a whole frame, rivalling well in the psychic economy of their owner. In
between the two blocks and sprinkled over the any Abstract Expressionist analogues in force the top-hat picture, likewise, it isn't
right-hand one are at least thirteen ruined and daring (see fig. 4); and there are other commercial sordidness that gets emphasized.
top-hats, probably of the sort worn by cabbies; pictures almost as fine.24 Furthermore, just as it The counterbalancing of the urban detritus by
and behind them in the window, and hanging is in these wholly unprecedented pictures that the reflected aspiring building and tree interlocks
outside too, are riding-boots and livery jackets. one is most immediately aware of Atget's with the associatively organic form
Reflected in the window are a high building completely free vision and effortless formal (water-over-rocks) that the detritus itself has
with lighted windows, and what appear to be mastery, so too it is in some of them that one is assumed, and, when further reinforced by the
the branches of a tree. Both pictures seem to me also, appropriately, most aware of light as a associations of the trunks and hampers, places
the product of the same vision; and to bring creative force in his picture-making—blurring, the fact of consumption and wearing out in a
out more clearly what that vision was, I would shaping, infiltrating, vitalizing, in ways that once context of natural and desirable movement and
like to turn away from them for a moment to again bring home to one how essential to him change.25 Another picture of a store-front is
Atget's nature pictures. were the technical 'imperfections' of his camera. even clearer in its symbolic juxtapositions, and

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