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| Atget, Eugene, Pont Neuf, 1900, Albumen Silver Print, 7 x 8.5 in |
Eugène Atget
Photographs from the MoMA
December 1 - December 22
The work of Eugène Atget is one of the richest pictorial embodiments of French culture—poised between tradition and experiment. In the rapid unfolding of modernist photography in the early 20th century, Atget’s work soon became the exemplar of the medium’s new creative power—the single most vital force that propelled photography from its documentary past into its artistic future.
Atget has rightly been considered first and foremost a photographer of Paris and its environs. This exhibition features outstanding examples from several of Atget’s bodies of work. Many of his earliest images were made in the Somme, a storied agrarian region in northern France. Atget recorded rural scenes and flora for his “Landscape Documents” series and Parisian architecture and architectural decoration in documenting how Paris was transformed through modernization. He turned his attention beyond the city's threatened architecture to its marginalized populations in 1913 with the series “Picturesque Paris”, working systematically in what was known as the zone, an area immediately outside the 19th-century fortifications that ringed Paris until after World War I. Atget’s more meditative photographs were made in the last decade of his life with his “Parks and Gardens” series. These late photographs have a qualitatively different sensibility: formally bold, they are also atmospheric and mysterious.
Photographs from the MoMA
December 1 - December 22
The work of Eugène Atget is one of the richest pictorial embodiments of French culture—poised between tradition and experiment. In the rapid unfolding of modernist photography in the early 20th century, Atget’s work soon became the exemplar of the medium’s new creative power—the single most vital force that propelled photography from its documentary past into its artistic future.
Atget has rightly been considered first and foremost a photographer of Paris and its environs. This exhibition features outstanding examples from several of Atget’s bodies of work. Many of his earliest images were made in the Somme, a storied agrarian region in northern France. Atget recorded rural scenes and flora for his “Landscape Documents” series and Parisian architecture and architectural decoration in documenting how Paris was transformed through modernization. He turned his attention beyond the city's threatened architecture to its marginalized populations in 1913 with the series “Picturesque Paris”, working systematically in what was known as the zone, an area immediately outside the 19th-century fortifications that ringed Paris until after World War I. Atget’s more meditative photographs were made in the last decade of his life with his “Parks and Gardens” series. These late photographs have a qualitatively different sensibility: formally bold, they are also atmospheric and mysterious.
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