SANS BLAGUE

A Portrait Of Eugène Atget

The best-known portraits of Jean-Eugène-Auguste Atget are those taken near the end of his life by Berenice Abbott. It’s hard to warm to these images of him as an old man, a bare husk of what he must have been in his prime. No reflection on Ms. Abbott, who was herself a brilliant photographer, and without whom Atget’s work might have been lost to obscurity.

I like this one of him in his 30s by an unknown photographer. He looks like a guy who might have been a sailor and an actor. At this point he had only just taken up the dark art.

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I think of Atget as the first photographer. Not the first person to use a camera, of course, but the first who really thought about the medium and its particular strengths and limitations. Someone who understood that photography was not painting, and deserved its own aesthetic.

He called many of his early photographs “études” and in these images of trees, grasses, garden ornaments he developed a way of looking at his surroundings with a frankness that I think rejected the romanticism of which he is so often accused.

He was born on February 12, 1857. Happy 162nd.