ATGET (France, 1857-1927)
Erosion and recycling
We enter the twentieth century - or a bit before - with Atget, and we
need to measure the road we travelled so far. In 1887, Maddox replaced the
difficultly moveable wet sensitive plate by the dry gelatine plate. In 1880, a
New York paper inaugurates the photoengraving process allowing for unlimited
reproduction at reduced costs. In 1887, the Blitzlicht-pulver, a powder
allowing the flash, is launched. In 1888, Eastman, then aged 35, designs and
commercializes the first Kodak box charged with a film reel (paper coated with
sensitized gelatine) of 100 views, whose principle he had developed in 1884. The
k-o-d-a-k phonics (k-k,o-a,d) evokes both the click and the canning.
Now, anyone can take photographs, anywhere, at any time, under every
possible angle: ‘You press the button. We do the rest’. Photography begins to
visualize everyday life and intimacy. It becomes a means of scientific
investigations on the animal movement with Muybridge and on oscillations with
Marey. It supports great inventories on the urban and social transformations
induced by the industrial revolution. Atget, who obeyed the official demands of
an inventory of the French heritage in its specificities from 1896-98 to his
death in 1927 – not only in some generalities – is a confluent of
this situation.
To define him, let
us remember that photography henceforth allowed to follow the slightest
crumbling, disintegration, porosities, the secret invasions of wind on stone
and wood, water, corrosions. Atget will use as photographic subject this
aptitude of dry plates and chambers of his era and will follow the complete
cosmogonist cycle according to which any natural or cultural product builds up,
stocks useful energy, intelligence and love. What the physician then names
information and neguentropy (Pierre Curie
introduces the notion before dying in 1906) simultaneously falls apart in
cracks and dust to become waste or to age while still in use, or still, before
disappearing into another partial and complete life. In all three cases, it
participates to entropy and noise - in the physician’s sense (Henri Poincaré’s
appalled page on the inexorable entropy of the universe dates from the same
period). This programme does not contradict Nadar’s physiological vision but
generalizes it by activating the full cycle: destruction>partial
redevelopment>destruction…
No earlier
representation would have been capable of following this cycle, not even the
extraordinary geological drawings of the Alps by Brueghel the Elder. By lack of
detail and continuity, but also because the hand and the brain that produce a
painting, sculpture, or architecture introduce construction even in
destruction. Velasquez and Goya recorded the decay of the body, Canaletto the
discoloring of Venice covered in saltpeter, but always following a domineering
view. To the contrary, largely independent from the brain, made up of
referential indexes or indexes, photography was capable of recording the slightest
modalities of noise and entropy, as well as information and neguentropy, testifying
of their reciprocal engendering.
Atget’s
photographic subject, applied to an old street, a facade, an alleyway or stairs
in a park supposes a particular approach of the motive. Every time, he searched
for the point from where nothing stood out or in preponderance, where nothing
would contrast or stick out or cut out or center, where everything would be
left to its local being, fleeting, equal, both made and unmade, hence very precisely
in becoming. The plan of the best definition - which is too declarative - had
to subordinate to the depth of the shot by reducing the diaphragm even if it
meant chopping the top of a scene. The photonic indices had to lead an
existence (indicial) that is as free as
possible, decipherable and indecipherable, recycled or de-cycled, without being
boosted by any one index. We had moved from WORLD 2 to WORLD 3, like Hill and
Adamson, although this time, it was done briskly, without Nadar’s
logic-semiotic paradoxes.
If Atget’s 18 x 24
negatives were detailed, his positive prints were often archaic because of
chemistry’s lateness over optics, but also because of the latent intention
– using the excuse of « these are only documents » - of keeping
them faded and tepid, according to the taker and the taken. Our ‘Entrée de la
cour du Dragon, 50, rue de Rennes’ (*) comes from page 33 of Atget, published by Le Chêne/Hachette, which offers 150 exemplary
photographs that were printed from the negatives more powerfully than Atget
himself would have done. This boost is questionable. Yet, it is more debatable
than Mozart played on a Steinway piano by Frank Braley? The primacy of texture
over structure - which is an essential phenomenon in Atget’s crumbling and germinal
world - is confirmed if it needed to be.
We see that there
is an Atget rhetoric. Yet it is at the opposite of eloquence. Theatricality too
- he dreamt of the stage for thirty years before dedicating his life to
photography. But not one that screams on stage, but rather one that haunts the
stocks of old stage scenery, pilling up, before and behind the scene, the
senses and nonsense of secular semiology; something of the new theatricality
(1892) and the new music (1902) of Pelléas and
Mélisande. Every defined emotion, every point,
every violence, every totalisation would have compromised the generality of the
fundamental cycle to the profit of the anecdote, or at least of the event.
Nothing better
defines Atget than his contrast with Marville. In 1865, the latter photographed
the same themes, streets, places and parks but with a completely different
photographic subject, seeking sharp fronts and angles (**PN, 108),
discontinuity (PN, 70), the decision, the contrast, the index frame, the
non-publicized separation of plans (AP, 68), immobile time, mirroring (AP, 74).
Atget was impossible before his time. Let us recall the little interest
granted by the Ancients to the cultural cycle, with the exception of Ibn
Khaldoun in a context that is not purely historical. For Chateaubriand to
perceive – around 1800 – the depth of past time (the ‘tradition’ in
the Confucian acception is at the opposite of a spatial time) a revolution as
radical and outspoken as the French revolution, the seism of the first
industrial revolution and ultimately the presentiment of an evolutionary
geography were all presupposed. Spencer will need another century to vulgarise
a generalised evolutionism with its concomitant lives and deaths, and for Curie
and Poincaré to question the couple entropy / neguentropy as principle of universes.
Among the artists, a fervent, silent, and imponderable recollection begun in
1885, engendering the surimpressions of the European Symbolism without Proust’s. Yet,
let us note that it is only with the Proust of Swann’s Way, with its grey phonics and syntax
made up of carnal and fluid compenetrations of moments, (those too of the Bergsonian
length) that Atget is consonant. The dates are pitiless.
Atget would not
have been possible without Paris. Paris is a city like no others. It is, just
like Rome, a patent case of the cultural recycling, yet it does not have Rome’s
creative and destructive fits and starts, and its cataclysms are less
grandiose. The desegregation and rehabilitation affect the most globalizing
architecture, the most daily carnal ever. Atget - theater lover and unfortunate
painter until he reached forty - probably found there, in the stock of calmly,
secularly recycled stage sets by his photographic subject, the essential
photographic subject of painters and dramas that he had dreamed of previously,
in vain.
His strolls in the
city, assigned by official and private commissions and some elements of luck,
show how the photographic subject calls on photographic themes or motives, not
the contrary. Atget will manage never to show the Eiffel Tower, that escaped
the cosmogonic cycle in its young days, but whose skeleton – with more
hollow parts than filled parts – would never be propitious to shed a good
light on this cycle. On the other hand, Notre-Dame could be tamed under the
condition that it was shot from the other side of the water through winter
branches, where, as immense as it might be, it would only appear as being in a
desagreged-reagreged state of a wider cycle. This is how he dared to approach
it in 1925, two years before he died (FS, 244), and three years before Proust
passed away.
Paradoxically,
Atget was also a contemporary of analytical and synthetic cubism and the
passage to atonality. In a nutshell, the huge revolution of the WORLD 2 to the
WORLD 3 occurred according to two main trends. Those that went beyond the Greek
totalizing ‘form’ to the profit of functioning elements while breaking the ‘form’
according to the path of discontinuation: Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Picasso, Schönberg.
Others operated the same de-centering by overlapping compenetrations according
to a continuous path: Bonnard, Dubussy, Proust, Valéry, and Bergson. Just like
Stieglitz that we will meet shortly, Atget follows the second path.
Henri Van Lier
A photographic history of photography
in Les Cahiers de la Photographie, 1992
List of abbreviations of common references:
PN: Photography until Now, Museum of Modem Art.
AP: The Art of Photography, Yale University Press.
FS: On the Art of Fixing a Shadow, Art Institute of Chicago.
The acronyms (*), (**), (***) refer to
the first, second, and third illustration of the chapters, respectively. Thus,
the reference (*** AP, 417) must be interpreted as: “This refers to the third
illustration of the chapter, and you will find a better reproduction, or a
different one, with the necessary technical specifications, in The Art of
Photography listed under
number 417”.