I recently acquired a seminal work on Atget’s professional practice: Molly Nesbit’s
, published in 1992 by Yale University Press. What follows is a review/discussion of Nesbit's book, and some thoughts inspired by it.
What did Atget photograph? The historical and monumental traces of French and Parisian culture, with priority given to collective and anonymous achievements; also, a great deal of contemporary economic activity, and the culture associated with it (as we'll see below, this might include shop fronts, kiosks and so on, or the dwelling places and places of work for specific categories of worker); also some rural landscapes and natural phenomena (e.g. trees), the last category because of their assumed interest for artists. Much of the historical subject matter was grouped together in the contemporary imagination under the heading of 'Old Paris'. Museums and libraries were interested in records of Old Paris; so were antiquarians and amateur historians. Some of the economic activity Atget photographed also fell within this field: old shop signs, for example, or traditional, itinerant street traders. But even within this larger field, Atget's was a selective vision. Waldemar George noted in 1930 that he 'disdains panoramic views, grand syntheses, and synoptic tableaus' (quoted in Nesbit, 18), and Nesbit expands on this:
Atget's documents put forward a popular Paris, without the high life, without the reveries of an ancien régime, without the bourgeoisie. His Paris was a mass of common detail. ... the small shopkeeper and the worker on the street are given pride of place. (5, 6)
Encountering Atget’s archive unmediated is however a dispiriting experience. For example the MOMA collection (this is where the Abbott material is now held) is available online, and its contents are displayed in strictly chronological order on the MOMA website, beginning roughly in 1898 – Atget was a late starter as a photographer, after previous careers as a merchant seaman and an actor. If this collection feels unedited, containing images of highly variable quality, that’s because it’s really equivalent to looking at Atget’s contact sheets. All the images are in fact literally contact prints: Atget used a large-format 8x10-inch camera and didn’t enlarge any of his images (or at least did so very rarely), but instead created them using printing-out paper exposed by sunlight directly through the negative. But it should also be noted that reviewing the MOMA archive is not like looking at, for example, Robert Frank’s 35mm contact sheets, some of which you can find in Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans. Atget’s large-format camera didn’t allow for the kind of loose, casual experimentation in sequence through multiple exposures that rolls of 35mm film do. And although there are in fact numerous instances of hm taking multiple exposures of the same subject from different angles, or returning to the same spot on different occasions (sometimes years apart), his method was not to work through successive exposures towards the perfect crystallisation of a scene; still less was he in search of a decisive moment in which unstable, fleeting elements were in balance.
Atget was surely aware that some of his plates were more effective pictorial statements than others, but their primary purpose was to be of use to his customers. In other words, while some of them were more successful than others as photographs, few of them were treated as failures by Atget or discarded, because the subjects were more important than his images of them. And so long as they pointed effectively towards those subjects, they were adequate. When presenting prints to potential customers, Atget grouped them in themed albums, but these were not permanent compilations, and were akin to a catalogue, updated regularly. It’s not clear to me if one of the principles of these updates was to supplant inferior views of particular subjects with later, improved iterations, but even if Atget sometimes did this, he didn’t do it systematically.
Atget’s influence has therefore mainly been via selections of his work edited posthumously by others according to their own interpretations of his significance – and written commentary on his work was crucial from the start for determining its wider reception. In the first instance, this meant the book produced by Abbott in 1930: Atget: Photographe de Paris, with (in its French and English editions) an introduction by Pierre MacOrlan. Benjamin’s remarks on Atget, along with some similarly influential commentary by Walker Evans, were based on this book. By contrast, I primarily encountered Atget through the Phaidon 55 on him, published in 2001, edited by and with commentary from Gerry Badger.
All of Atget’s editors were in fact doing something similar to what his original customers did during his lifetime: putting together their own collections of his work according to their own predilections. These customers included artists – he famously described his practice as producing ‘documents for artists’ – illustrators, set designers, craftsmen, builders, architects, antiquarians, and above all several institutional libraries in Paris (also occasionally the V&A in London). For both Atget and his clients, his photographs:
were meant to refer beyond themselves, to be taken up repeatedly, to have several futures, and to exist as a point of detail on the way to one of them. They were meant to be incomplete. (35)
Most of his customers acquired multiple prints, and many of the libraries he sold to bought several hundred over the course of his career, which he or they might bind into albums, though not necessarily labelled with his name; and libraries might also mix his photographs with images on related subjects by others.
Nesbit's book is therefore of particular interest because the title refers to bound collections of images arranged by Atget, six of which he sold as integral albums to the Bibliothèque Nationale, where they were entered in the catalogue under his name as author and editor. Nesbit presents all the images from these albums in their original order, along with a seventh album that Atget also prepared, but failed to sell, and she analyses their contents within Atget’s larger practice and body of work. In doing so, she is concerned with an apparent contradiction: Atget’s description of his work as providing ‘documents for artists’, together with his disclaimer to Man Ray when the Surrealists wanted to use examples of his work as illustrations of the way unconscious energies animated the everyday: ‘Don’t put my name on it. These are simply documents I make.’ In fact, in other contexts Atget was quite happy to receive a named credit when his images were published as illustrations (as they often were), not least because that might increase his future sales, so one assumes he was specifically dubious about being associated with the Surrealists. In any case, how are we to square this with the description on his business card of ‘Author-Editor’ (the latter word can mean publisher as well as editor in French)? Nesbit sets out to explain precisely what it meant for Atget to create documents as an author and publisher: that is, she considers these terms in their contemporary cultural and legal contexts.
Atget's Seven Albums is clearly based on years of exhaustive research into the photographer’s papers and images, along with supporting investigations in French records and archives. Nesbit is insistent throughout that the key to understanding Atget is not to be found in treating him as an artist, which was not a synonym for author. He did not see himself as an artist, and nor did any of his customers. And that fact does not diminish or belittle his very real achievements.
This insistence has a wider significance for me. I am a photographer, and I prefer the work of other photographers. I mean that I am suspicious of those who situate themselves as artists first and photographers second. To give some specific examples: I prefer Gabriele Basilico to Thomas Struth; Robert Adams to Ed Ruscha; Atget to the Bechers. The primary orientation of photography should be towards the world, not the art market. I don’t need the word ‘artist’ to justify or dignify my work as a photographer, and Atget is the patron saint of this attitude. (This is about the primary orientation of the work: it doesn’t preclude making money from it or showing it in galleries, though I think it does preclude selling NFTs.)
In several cases, Nesbit is able to demonstrate how specific clients of Atget used particular images as references for their paintings and illustrations. She’s also able to show how images were used as illustrations in their own right in published works by others, with or without credit to Atget – though even with credit the photographs are never treated as anything other than transparent depictions of their subjects. However, the primary interest of Nesbit’s book is in presenting a selection of Atget’s work in terms dictated by the man himself, intended for posterity. The titular seven albums represent only a small fragment of the work Atget created, and his choice to present them as integral collections was dictated partly by opportunity, but they nonetheless show his creative intelligence at work as an editor of his own work.
The albums were all created in the years immediately preceding the First World War (the last was actually edited and presented to the library during the War, but the images were taken in 1913). They are on the following subjects:
Art in Old Paris [L’Art dans le Vieux Paris]
Parisian Interiors / Early Twentieth Century / Artistic / Picturesque & Bourgeois [Intérieurs Parisiens Debut du XXe Siècle Artistiques Pittoresques & Bourgeois]
Vehicles in Paris [La Voiture à Paris]
Trades, shops and shop displays of Paris [Métiers, boutiques et étalages de Paris]
Signboards and old shops of Paris [Enseignes et vieilles boutiques de Paris]
Inhabitants of the Zone [Zoniers]
Fortifications of Paris [Fortifications de Paris]
Art in Old Paris: The first album is the least successful, in every respect, but it is the most fully worked up as an object. It was prepared on Atget's instructions by a printer as a maquette with typeset captions, since Atget hoped to have it published as a book. Nesbit explains the likely reasons why he failed:
L'Art dans le Vieux Paris provided evidence, concrete evidence of Atget's defects, evidence of how habitually he had come to fidget within the regulation forms of the document, angling his perspectives more than necessary, not always aiming for perfect symmetry, making heavy contrast and uneven lighting his trademarks, allowing traces of later historical time to appear. Repeatedly we see doors left open, signs posted, horse manure in the streets.
Atget lost respectability with the Vieux Parisiens because of these kinds of details. He had not distinguished sufficiently between past achievement and modern debasement. No condemnation of the modern signboard, for instance, was made in the captions, no reference to the crashing incomprehension of the modern bourgeois culture that would sacrifice its past in the name of progress and profit. No effort to suppress or retouch the details of common life like carts and brooms and invocations to wipe one's feet please before climbing the stairs. (110)
Indeed, when Atget’s images were used as illustrations in books by others on Old Paris, Nesbit shows how they were retouched and/or cropped to exclude the details she singles out here (people, carts, etc.).
His captions for this maquette were far more detailed than usual, and even offer some anodyne aesthetic judgements ('remarkable', 'very beautiful'), but they were mostly cribbed from a guidebook: Nesbit also shows that they were sometimes erroneous, which would have been fatal for the book’s reception with an antiquarian audience.
‘Art’ in this album is really the work of craftsmen: that is, the decorative arts and architecture, not painting, although the album includes depictions of sculpture. But, although Nesbit identifies a logic of sorts in this presentation, to me it feels like a pretty random compendium of these historical traces, with a little of everything but no systematic account of anything, and it doesn’t really play to Atget’s strengths. Even though this maquette was neither published nor acquired by the Bibliothèque Nationale, that institution signalled it would be receptive to other work presented in a similar format, which Atget duly provided.
Parisian Interiors / Early Twentieth Century / Artistic / Picturesque & Bourgeois: Atget's work is sometimes compared to Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant, which I discussed in a previous post, but there’s a lot of crossover with Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project as well. For example, Benjamin discusses the bourgeois interior, of the sort depicted in this album, which is about the relationship between culture and economy. These are unusual images for Atget, for whom negotiating access to interiors was no doubt extra work, which would have necessitated ingratiating himself with the occupants, and again the survey is less systematic than the title implies. For example, Atget’s own home appears three times, attributed each time to a different fictional occupant and occupation. In the first instance, he is ‘un’artiste dramatique’: this is not in fact a lie, since 'actor' remained his official occupation for several years after he began his photographic practice, and he continued in this line of work until c. 1910. In its last phase, his acting work seems to have consisted primarily of recitations of plays for working-class audiences attending night-school classes.
Nesbit contends that this album demonstrates Atget’s class consciousness by ironically juxtaposing interiors from wealthy occupants with more modest ones, but to me viewing these a century after the images were taken the similarity of the décor is more striking: that is, the more modest interiors seem to aspire to the same aesthetic as the wealthier ones. All the rooms are very cluttered; many have framed prints on the walls. Indeed, Nesbit quotes a contemporary writer, Léon Werth, who also made this point in 1910:
One sees the same furniture everywhere, in the ministries, in the bourgeois homes, in the workers' homes, in the brothels. The salon of le grand 16 resembles the boss's office: the same armchairs, same consoles, same carpets, same Diane de Falguières. An epoch without style? But it all holds together, goes together: stamped furniture from Saint-Antoine and paste jewels from the rue de la Paix. (120)
I know Atget primarily used a wide-angle lens, but I don’t know how wide: my guess would be a 180mm (roughly equal to a 28mm on a 35mm camera). In any case, while this worked fine for external views of architecture, where one usually had the option of taking a step backwards, it wasn’t quite wide enough for some of these views, which sometimes feel a little cramped or awkwardly cropped. I also don’t know if he used flash, but my guess would be no on the basis of the lighting patterns.
Vehicles in Paris: this is an almost comically matter-of-fact survey of carts, carriages and trams, with all the images framed fairly tightly (that is, although there are background details, here they don’t interact in an interesting way with the ostensible subjects). There are no motor cars: these occasionally appear in other Atget images, but, with the possible exception of the trams, everything here is horse-drawn – though the horses themselves are often cropped or absent, since Atget had to photograph stationary examples, so it was more convenient if they were parked. The effect is a little like one of Ed Ruscha’s books of gas stations or parking lots, though Atget's subjects feel closer to the world of the craftsman, simply because most of the vehicles are made of wood. And of course Atget’s intention was quite different to Ruscha's: not to illustrate the idea of taxonomy, but actually to be taxonomic. Ruscha is purposefully useless: Atget always intends to be useful. I wonder for whom these images might still be useful? Set designers for historical dramas perhaps – Atget’s original customers also included such people, though probably not in the case of this album, since they would not have needed to re-create contemporary vehicles. It's a measure of Nesbit's skill as a critic that she's able to identify a coherent vision of society, class and modernity from this unlikely subject matter:
Bicycles and automobiles were not at all involved in Atget's sample: there was a decided lack of pretty or family carriages, the kind of transport most associated with bourgeois life in town. ... Instead the album began with the lower orders of delivery tricks and migrants' trailers, interspersing the occasional taxi-cab but nonetheless remaining at the level of the working class of vehicle through most of its duration. Milk trucks, coal trucks, delivery trucks for Suze, paddy wagons, asphalt mixers, garbage trucks specializing in the kind of waste tactfully called mud. It paid special attention at one point to moving vans, distinguished from one another by the tenant's terme, the quarterly period by which rents were calculated and paid. This was the view of modern transportation. By any account it avoided much of what was considered modern.
Atget cut the voiture from its normal ties to modernity, from the promotional line of the "latest model" and from the concept of traffic. Time was cut off at the present. Traffic had no place. (126)
Trades, shops and shop displays of Paris: As Nesbit points out, the images here are mainly of shop displays, with only a couple of interiors. Some of Atget’s most famous images depict shop windows and mannequins, but most of those date from the 1920s. In all cases, Atget's examples are not artful displays in department stores, which are in fact deliberately excluded. Rather, this album depicts open-air displays, often on tables set up on the pavement in front of shops, or market stalls, many selling food (vegetables, fish). Similarly, there are also plenty of kiosks (for newspapers or flowers). In other words, the featured businesses mostly sell to customers walking past on the street, and they form part of the life of the street. Their goods are not encountered as spectacle, separated from viewers behind glass, but are experienced with other senses besides sight: smell and touch.
Admittedly not everything here fits this pattern. The album also includes a few cabaret or brasserie facades, along with one brothel entrance, and a few interiors: of two different wine merchants, a potter, a bookbinder – and Atget’s own desk advertised as the place of work of a photographer. The inclusion of this last means it’s not fanciful to suggest that Atget identified his own work with the other economic activities depicted here. Certainly he also mainly worked in the street (MacOrlan: 'Atget was a man of the street, an artisan poet of the Paris crossroads').
Nesbit argues convincingly that this album shows Atget constructing his own distinctive vision of Paris, and working against established traditions to do it:
This Paris was neither particularly vieux nor particularly gay. Atget was isolating a third city, a city that wore neither its heart nor its mores on its sleeve, and perhaps because of this it seemed unsettled, contorted, plagued by a persistent, whistling ostranenie. (132)
We are given to look at these pictures from the ungainly position of the shopper, and even more specifically, the working-class shopper.
The viewer of the album was plunged into the one commcercial world that did not exist for the sole purpose of serving bourgeois need ... (160)
Signboards and old shops of Paris: This is back in Old Paris territory, since many of the shop signs and metal grills shown here were historical (or certainly the names were; many of the signs were likely nineteenth century). But the treatment here is more successful than the first album, even if seemingly quite modest in scope and ambition (Nesbit has more interesting things to say about this album than I have space to summarise here).
Inhabitants of the Zone: The last two albums are the most interesting. The ‘Zone’ was an area outside the city walls of Paris where permanent structures were forbidden. Originally this prohibition was for the purposes of military defence: I imagine to leave clean fields of fire beyond the city’s outlying fortifications. The disastrous outcome of the Franco–Prussian War of 1870–1, during which Paris had been occupied, had revealed the obsolescence of this provision, but it hadn’t been repealed. So although the Zone had many inhabitants, they lived in nominally temporary accommodation.
This album concentrates on a particular group of Zoniers: the chiffoniers, or rag-pickers, whose activities were an integral part of the daily rubbish disposal and recycling process in Paris, where they had the right to collect and sort certain kinds of material (glass, metal, cloth, etc.). Atget’s photographs show the caravans and shacks where they both lived and worked, along with several depots or intermediate businesses where the sorted rubbish was collected before being fed back into the city’s economy. He doesn’t however provide any detailed captions for any of this, so we are reliant on Nesbit’s commentary for making sense of what we see, and more broadly for understanding the place of the chiffoniers within French culture and the Parisian economy.
The ragpickers themselves appear intermittently, usually paused from their work, sometimes a little blurred by the long exposure: that is, Atget doesn’t attempt to depict their activities directly for the most part, still less to make candid portraits. But these are fascinating and powerful pictures, which Nesbit convincingly argues have a political subtext. They certainly lack the kind of comforting framing of Paris After Dark, in which the captions assert that everything and everyone has a place, and therefore everything is as it should be.
Fortifications of Paris: This album also depicts the Zone, but here concentrating on the undeveloped scrubland directly abutting the walls and defences. This unstructured space was very different to the urban locations Atget normally photographed, which had been densely settled and occupied and redeveloped over hundreds of years.
My earlier comparison between the vehicles album and Ed Ruscha was a little facetious, but here the images genuinely do seem to anticipate the New Topographics trend of the 1970s and 80s, and in particular Lewis Baltz’s projects on San Quentin Point and Candlestick Point from the 1980s, which similarly depict degraded semi-rural environments just outside the city limits. Most of Atget’s images in this album do show aspects of the city defences, but often the fortifications are relegated to the background, and the foreground is instead filled with uncultivated brownfields, which are punctuated with semi-official or desire paths trod out by regular city visitors. These compositions often focus on trees as organising features.
There are also several images of railway tracks and junctions, which exited Paris at several points, or of culverts where polluted water trickled out. Many of the images are quite abstract, for example the one reproduced above, which works as a series of slashing diagonals and v-shapes. In a body of work so obsessed with the accumulated traces of culture and history, these images are quite startlingly different.
Although Nesbit’s book is in many ways an exemplary academic study, it has some issues worth mentioning. As with most humanities writing from the 1990s, you need some tolerance for Foucault, although his The Archaeology of Knowledge is undeniably relevant for a study of a maker of documents for institutional clients. On the whole, this is a well-written book: it's clear and thorough when Nesbit needs to establish a point of fact; it's stylish and sophisticated when advancing an argument. But it does sometimes lapse into academic-ese, and there are a few too many sentences I found impossible to parse even after several readings. It sometimes has the typical academic habit of talking around a crucial point without ever trying to provide a clear definition, as if the question is too profound or complex to address directly. And on a related but different point, it doesn't always define its terms clearly. For example, the idea that Atget's images contain 'technical signs', a phrase that recurs constantly but is never defined. From the context it seems to mean something like 'the ostensible or apparent justification for the image's existence in relation to a particular, technical purpose', e.g. the inclusion of a shop sign in a street scene to enable its sale to an Old Paris specialist. But the clumsiness of this attempted definition itself illustrates the problem here.
It’s instructive to note how a study like this required a great deal of financial support to enable publication, but even with that support, the image reproduction is ... fine. It's good for this kind of book – actually, it's about the same as my book! – but it's inferior to the Steidl editions we've discussed previously, which use duotone or tritone printing. Here the paper seems to be coated, and the content of the images is reproduced accurately, but the printing is likely black ink only with a single pass through the press, which means the images come out a little flat, with thin blacks and crushed highlights. It does however have a huge number of illustrations, including large-scale reproductions of selected Atget images as figures accompanying the text, along with a wide variety of other visual sources for comparison.
By contrast, the images from the seven albums are presented in appendices, four to a page: that is, much smaller than the actual negatives (and sometimes too small to make out the details mentioned in Nesbit’s commentary). They're also on a different paper stock, with a glossier coating, but the advantage of this is wasted because they're printed darker, which obliterates a lot of the shadow detail. But given how much is included here, and what an enormous labour of compilation and permissions it represents, it’s hard to resent the understandable compromises made in the book's production. Less forgivable is the reluctance to translate key passages from French: sometimes there’s a translation (even if confined to the endnotes), and sometimes there isn’t. People who aren’t fluent in French are interested in reading about Atget too!
This book is now out of print, and second-hand copies are expensive. As an alternative, I’d still recommend the Phaidon 55 on Atget by Gerry Badger, which is much smaller and cheaper second-hand than Atget's Seven Albums – especially since it’s now clear to me how much Badger’s image selection and commentary both draw on Nesbit's work.
As a final point, I'd note that, while I feel I understand Atget's work far better after reading this book, I'm not sure it will have much direct effect on my own photographic practice going forward. Whereas there are half a dozen phrases in Badger's commentary in the Phaidon 55 that I come back to again and again. E.g. 'the sense of space in an Atget image, even one describing an enclosed area, is usually expansive rather than restrictive, offering a choice of ways by which the viewer may enter or leave.' (Badger, 50)
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