L'Imagier

Photographs by an important early French photographer are on exhibit at the small gallery next to the Patisserie Gabrielle. The collection of plates belongs to the New York photographer Bernice Abbot, who discovered Eugene Atget in 1925 and saved his work from destruction.

In the 1880's Atget, an unsuccessful actor, turned to photography and began the project on which his fame rests--the photographic documentation of Paris. His portfolio included studies of buildings, fountains, churches and home interiors, as well as pictures of art objects. From the outer shell of the city he worked into its living core, moving among the people to catch an unforgettable panorama of faces and figures.

Atget liked to take pictures at odd times of day to avoid crowds. Moving stealthily about with his camera equipment in the quiet hours, he was a suspicious character and was actually arrested for spying several times just prior to the First World War. The early morning light in which he took many pictures imparts a foreboding quiet, to his studies.

In his approach, Atget was straight forward. He worked without reference to other arts and aloof from the aesthetic controversy that was still raging in America as to whether or not photography was an art. Relying simply on his feeling for subject and composition, he produced sensitive portraits of a city and an era. Atget used no camera tricks; there is no special cropping or double exposures or any of the hundred other devices that some photographers have since used to make photography merit the name of art. The art in Atget was his ability to see and this quality still distinguishes the greatest photographers.

One of the most remarkable pictures in this series is that of the little girl dancing to the organ grinder's tune. Atget has caught a mood that is beautiful and profound. The beatific smile of youth contrasts with sullen resolution of old age. In the portraits of the Ragpicker, Flowerman and Prostitute, Atget posed his subjects. At other times he caught people when they were so absorbed as to be motionless. But in this as in other respects Atget was a deliberate primitive. The technique was not without hazard. In one picture, a view along the Seine, exposed for the usual twenty to thirty minutes, horses which appear slightly blurred actually walked out of the picture. In most cases, however, the detail is exceedingly sharp; this contributes to Atget's concern for little human touches--a pair of shoes or the clutter of a living room.

The studies of store fronts are now familiar, not for the Victorian corsets or the old top hats, but for Atget's treatment of glass and reflection, which is strikingly modern, indeed almost surrealistic. His photographs were in fact first published in a Surrealistic magazine in 1926. The study of a tree stump will also strike many as similar to the contemporary Edward Weston's Point Lobos series. Both in the problems he proposed and in his direct approach to them, Atget was at once a pioneer and a master. This is a rare opportunity to examine the work of the imagier, who "could find the human quality" even "where no human beings appear."