Paris after Atget

Colonne de Juillet, Place de la Bastille, 11e, 2007, gelatin silver, 13 x 18.5 in

Thaddeus Holownia went to Paris more than once before undertaking this series. These missions set up in him a different appetite – that is why we travel after all. He would not go after surfaces, but layers. An archaeologist would call this a ‘dig’: the careful exploration of a site to reveal and, sometimes, extract evidence of its former states and uses. All photographers, consciously or unconsciously, traffic in history and memory. Any photographic image can be excavated for signs of the past and most can help us to visualize changes to the earth or the living arrangements of its earthly creatures. History, as Jacques Le Goff tells us, “can only be a science of change and the explanation of change.” Any object or scene is infused with this dynamic potential; a photograph does not capture all of it, to be sure, but preserves and circulates an observant photographer’s insights about the history-in-the-making of a place.

Street calligraphy, 2007, gelatin silver, 13 x 18.5 in

Holownia has called this series “Paris after Atget.” In his statement of plans, he mentions not only Eugène Atget (1856 – 1927), who spent most of his working life intimately and exhaustively documenting the city, but Walker Evans (1903 – 1975) who spent about a year in the city (much of that reading books!) before returning home to America where his photographic subjects became places abandoned and people in transition and neglect. Scouting Paris with these ghosts, Holownia developed a comprehensive list of sites, scattered over twenty arrondissements, that responded to Atget’s rigour, sense of belonging, and visual poetry, as well as Evans’s eye-opening, fleeting experience.

Terrasse Lautreamont, 2007, gelatin silver, 13 x 18.5 in

A selection of photographs from Paris after Atget now on view at Corkin Gallery.

Photography by Thaddeus Holownia

Text by Martha Langford