One of the greatest photographers, Atget envisioned Paris as it had never been seen before. This photograph of a crowd looking at shards of mirrors was a favourite of the Surrealists. Master of the deserted cityscape, Atget's influence can be seen on painters like Chirico, I would venture, and certainly on Edward Hopper as he was ready to admit. A faithful subscriber to the libertarian paper La Guerre Sociale, Atget took the side of the downtrodden, as seen in his pictures of the Zone ( the impoverished shanty town area , home to the "lumpenproletariat" so despised by Marx and to gypsies like Django Reinhardt) and of ragpickers and prostitutes. While Baudelaire wrote poetry about ragpickers, Atget photographed them.
An excellent collection of his photos here:http://expositions.bnf.fr/atget/
"He was their counterpart as well as their partisan, a scavenger of sorts himself, a shorer of ruins, a recycler of trash who could find all kinds of valuables in the least of the city's leavings." Marina Warner
Labels: Atget, Paris, Surrealists
# posted by Nick Heath @ 4:09 PM
