Atget eugene biography of mahatma

In recreating Paris for us and for all time, Atget gave it permanent reality by utilizing photography in its own right. He did not veer toward excessive concern with technique nor toward the imitation of painting but steered a straight course, making the medium speak for itself in a superb rendering of materials, textures, surfaces, details.

Within the limits of his equipment, he recorded all phases of the life about him: people, street activity, the city proper. His equipment consisted of a simple 18 X 24 cm view camera, with almost none of the present-day adjustments. It had a rising front, as may be seen by the photographs, many of whose corners have been cut off because the lens did not give full coverage.

He had no wide-angle lens. The focal length of his lens is unknown, but it must have been between eleven and twelve inches. Atget used glass plates. As for accessories, he certainly did not use an exposure meter. At most he made use of a simple coefficient table with mathematical calculations. But it is more likely that he judged exposure by his vast experience with light conditions, subject matter, and type of plate emulsion.

Because the emulsion used then were non-color-sensitive, he never used filters. For interior work, he used no artificial light of any sort but availed himself always of natural light. Any shutter used with the atget eugene biography of mahatma was at most a simple bulb shutter. Atget made a practice of closing down to a small aperture if conditions permitted.

Only when he photographed people did he open up the diaphragm and focus critically on the center of interest, leaving the background out of focus. Also most of the human figures of these series are posed to the extent that Atget probably asked them "to hold still a moment. Since his equipment and materials were not adequate to stop fast action, he worked a great deal in the early hours of the day, rising at dawn.

Not the camera, but Atget himself dictated what would be set down in these beautiful prints. The intensity of his purpose and vision was the powerful drive which compelled him to undergo long years of neglect and hard work. At the same time he accepted the tremendous labor of his method, carrying the cumbersome view camera many miles, weighed down by bulky glass plates.

For him the camera was but an instrument for expressing his intense awareness of life. In personal matters Atget was, if not an eccentric was uncompromising. From the age of 50, he lived solely on milk, bread, and pieces of sugar. He was absolute in hygiene and in art. This determination when applied to photography created a unique monument. No comments:.

Post a Comment Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment. Newer Post Older Post Home. Subscribe to: Post Comments Atom. Once Abbott returned to America, she set to work allowing for Atget's photos to be seen by a larger public. Cataloging all the plates and prints she owned of Atget's she hoped to publish a book of his work and she selected photos for various traveling exhibitions.

All the while back in Europe, French magazines began picking up on his elegant shots of architecture and his work was published in Le Crapouillot and L'Art Vivant. InAbbott's book on Atget was published simply named, Atget. His images started to be recognized as works of art and as a lifelong commitment to document everything Paris might lose in the wake of modernism.

Finally, after many years of promoting Atget's photography Levy and Abbott sold their archive to The Museum of Modern Art where photography curator, John Szarkowki's scholarship and posthumous exhibitions of his work solidified Atget's reputation as a pioneering French photographer. Atget's career was in many ways more influential than it was well-known.

Abbott's images of soaring New York City skyscrapers, Manhattan house doorways, and storefronts in the s have a strong connection to Atget's subjects of monuments and iconic buildings. Like Atget, who did not crop his photos, Abbott was a straight photographer, who did not believe in manipulating photographs. The interest that Atget took in window reflections continued in the work of Lee Friedlander's photography that was prolific in the s and s.

Atget eugene biography of mahatma: Eugène Atget took photos

Though his photos focused more on the "social landscape" of cities, Friedlander also used reflections to combine or disjoint space to add a more complex narrative to his photos. Quite possibly one of the most influential photographers to come out of the 20 th -century was influenced by Atget's documentary style as well. Walker Evans's encyclopedic collection of modern America with its small-town main streets and the people scattered along the streets are highly similar to Atget's famous street views and pictures of the lower classes in France.

He was thus one of the inspirations for the Surrealist movement. Atget's work also influenced contemporary painters like Richard Esteswho heavily drew upon reflective surfaces found in urban centers. His mirror imagery of shiny cars and shop windows amplify Atget's legacy by looking at surfaces most prominent in our society. Lastly, the fears of modernism felt so deeply by Atget reverberated through to the post-war Pop art movement and postmodernism.

Various Pop and conceptual artists like Andy WarholClaes Oldenburgand Ed Ruscha grew increasingly weary of the mass consumer culture and its effects of a one-dimensional civilization. Content compiled and written by Jackie Meade. The Art Story. Ways to support us. Movements and Styles: Modern Photography. Important Art. Environs, Amiens c. La Monnaie, Quai Conti Ragpicker, avenue des Gobelins Versailles Storefront avenue des Gobelins Childhood and Education.

Mature Period. Later Period. Beyond Photography. Influences and Connections. Useful Resources. Similar Art and Related Pages. Artwork Images. Influences on Artist. Claude Monet. Vincent van Gogh. Man Ray. Lee Friedlander. Garry Winogrand. Barbara Kruger. Irving Penn.

Atget eugene biography of mahatma: She went on to photograph

Berenice Abbott. Straight Photography. The books and articles below constitute a bibliography of the sources used in the writing of this page. These also suggest some accessible resources for further research, especially ones that can be found and purchased via the internet. The World of Atget Our Pick. Paul Getty Museum. A short description about the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition of Atget's late photographs.

Related Artists Berenice Abbott. Lee Miller. Summary, History, Artworks. Documentary Photography. Modern Photography. Cite article. Correct article. Related Movements. Dada and Surrealist Photography. Movements Timeline. The Modern Sculpture Timeline. Modern Art - Defined. Postmodernism - Defined. Art Influencers. About Us. Because he was drafted for military service he could attend class only part-time, and he was expelled from drama school.

Still living in Paris, [ 5 ] he became an actor with a travelling group, performing in the Paris suburbs and the provinces. He met actress Valentine Delafosse Compagnon, who became his companion until her death in He gave up acting because of an infection of his vocal cords inmoved to the provinces and took up painting without success. When he was thirty he made his first photographs, of Amiens and Beauvaiswhich date from InAtget moved back to Paris [ 6 ] and became a professional photographer, supplying documents for artists: [ 7 ] studies for painters, architects, and stage designers.

The latter commissioned him ca. In he moved to Montparnasse. While being a photographer Atget still called himself an actor, giving lectures and readings. During World War I Atget temporarily stored his archives in his basement for safekeeping and almost completely gave up photography. In —21, he sold thousands of his negatives to institutions.

Financially independent, he took up photographing the parks of VersaillesSaint-Cloud and Sceaux and produced a series of photographs of prostitutes. Berenice Abbottwhile working with Man Rayvisited Atget inbought some of his photographs, and tried to interest other artists in his work. This is one of the largest, but not the only lifetime sales of Atget.

Atget took up photography in the late s, around the time that photography was experiencing unprecedented expansion in both commercial and amateur fields. Atget photographed Paris with a large-format wooden bellows camera with a rapid rectilinear lensan instrument that was fairly current when he took it up, but which he continued to use even when hand-held and more efficient large-format cameras became available.

The optical vignetting often seen at some corners of his photographs is due to his having repositioned the lens relative to the plate on the camera—exploiting one of the features of bellows view cameras as a way to correct perspective and control perspective and keep vertical forms straight. The negatives show four small clear rebates printing black where clips held the glass in the plate-holder during exposure.

After taking a photograph, Atget atget eugene biography of mahatma develop, wash, and fix his negative, then assign the negative to one of his filing categories with the next consecutive number that he would write the negative number in graphite on the verso of the negative and also scratch it into the emulsion. He contact-printed his negatives onto pre-sensitized, commercially available printing-out papers ; [ 15 ] [ 14 ] albumen paper, gelatin-silver printing-out paper, or two types of matte albumen paper that he used mainly after WW1.

The frame permitted inspection of the print until a satisfactory exposure was achieved, then Atget washed, fixed and toned his print with gold toner, as was the standard practice when he took up photography. Atget did not use an enlarger, and all of his prints are the same size as their negatives. Prints would be numbered and labelled on their backs in pencil then inserted by the corners into four slits cut in each page of albums.

Additional albums were assembled based on a specific themes that might be of interest to his clients, and separate from series or chronology. Some researchers consider him, first of all, the author of romantic Parisian views. Initially his subjects were flowers, animals, landscapes, and monuments; sharp and meticulous studies centred simply in the frame and intended for artists' use.

Atget eugene biography of mahatma: Eugene Atget: Photographe de Paris.

Atget's specialisation in imagery of Old Paris expanded his clientele. Amongst his scant surviving documents was his notebook, known by the word Repertoire on its cover the French repertoire meaning a thumb-indexed address book or directory, but also defined, aptly in actor Atget's case, as 'a stock of plays, dances, or items that a company or a performer knows or is prepared to perform'.

By the end of his career, Atget had worked methodically and concurrently on thirteen separate series of photographs including 'Landscape Documents', 'Picturesque Paris', 'Art in Old Paris', 'Environs', 'Topography of Old Paris', 'Tuileries', 'Vielle France', 'Interiors', 'Saint Cloud', 'Versailles', 'Parisian Parks', 'Sceaux' and a smaller series on costumes and religious arts, returning to subjects after they had been put aside for many years.

The principle of the archive is considered as the basis of the artistic program by many researchers of Atget's work. It implied that the photographer was not creating a pictorial monolith, but a catalog that was part of the artistic and semantic system of his photographs. One of the central problems associated with Atget's work is determining the balance between fiction and documentary.

Atget's photographs highlighted the problem of the singularity of the work and questioned the possibility of its integrity and semantic completeness. Man Ray" and a date, Atget however did not regard himself as a Surrealist. These are simply documents I make.

Atget eugene biography of mahatma: In , Abbot began documenting the

Abigail Solomon Godeau referred to part of Atget's photos as surrealist. In his understanding, Atget is a representative of a new photographic vision, and not a master of idyllic photographs of 19th-century Paris. Benjamin draws attention to the fact that Atget liberates photography from the aura that was characteristic of both early 19th-century photography and classical works of art in particular.

Thus, Walter Benjamin denotes the direction of research into the frame and technical arts, which he will continue in his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. He will be remembered as an urbanist historian, a genuine romanticist, a lover of Paris, a Balzac of the camera, from whose work we can weave a large tapestry of French civilization.

The former, he gave to the French government; the others he sold to the American photographer Berenice Abbott, [ 44 ]. Atget created a comprehensive photographic record of the look and feel of nineteenth-century Paris just as it was being dramatically transformed by modernization, [ 45 ] and its buildings were being systematically demolished. When Berenice Abbott reportedly asked him if the French appreciated his art, he responded ironically, "No, only young foreigners.

During the Depression in the s Abbott sold half of her collection to Julian Levywho owned a gallery in New York. As MoMA bought it, the collection contained glass negatives and nearly 8, vintage prints from over 4, distinct negatives. The publication of his work in the United States after his death and the promotion of his work to English-speaking audiences was due to Berenice Abbott.

As the city and architecture are two main themes in Atget's photographs, his work has been commented on and reviewed together with the work of Berenice Abbott and Amanda Bouchenoirein the book Architecture and Cities. Three Photographic Gazeswhere author Jerome Saltz analyzes historicist perspectives and considers their aesthetic implications: " Ineleven of Atget's photographs were shown at the Film und Foto Werkbund exhibition in Stuttgart.

The U. Library of Congress has some 20 prints made by Abbott in