Eugène Atget : unknown Paris / David Harris.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Harris, David, 1950-

Contributor:

Gotham Book Mart Collection (University of Pennsylvania)

Language:

English

French

Subjects (All):

Photography, Artistic.

Atget, Eugène, 1857-1927.

Atget, Eugène.

Paris (France)--Pictorial works.

Paris (France).

Genre:

Illustrated works.

Penn Provenance:

Gotham Book Mart (former owner) (Gotham Book Mart Collection copy)

Physical Description:

199 pages : illustrations, maps ; 28 cm

Place of Publication:

New York : New Press : Distributed by W.W. Norton, 2003.

Summary:

In the twentieth century, two photographers. Berenice Abbott and Eugene Atget, were able to truly capture the spirit of the cities in which they lived. Thanks to the efforts of Abbott -- who drew inspiration from Atget and went on to replicate his work in her native New York -- Atget's negatives were salvaged, and his reputation preserved for posterity. Her famous images of New York City comprise Berenice Abbott: Changing New York, published by The New Press. Now, this companion volume presents a wealth of previously unpublished material by Eugene Atget himself.

During the first quarter of the twentieth century, the short, stocky figure of photographer Eugene Atget was a familiar sight in Paris. From 1898 until his death in 1927, Atget took approximately five thousand negatives in the city, systematically documenting its historic core: its buildings and monuments, its ancient streets and civic spaces, its public parks and gardens. Atget chose not to represent a particular site by a single, definitive photograph: instead he consistently produced sequences of interrelated images to create a cumulative portrait of each setting.

Featuring 240 of Atget's photographs -- only a few of which have previously been published -- this book examines Atget's approach to photography by studying these sequences: his pictures of an individual building, a street, an intersection, the quays along the river Seine, and a neighborhood. Assembling these images into coherent groups. Unknown Paris displays the direct and integral relationship between the photographer's working method and his subject matter, in turn revealing the distinctive character of old Paris itself.

Contents:

Chapter 1 Observing Eugene Atget 2

Chapter 2 Atget's Life As a Commercial Photographer 8

Chapter 3 Atget at Work 16

Chapter 4 Seven Parisian Sites 36

1. Hotel de Beauvais 38

2. Hotel de Ranes and the rue Visconti 46

3. The rue du Parc-Royal, the rue de Sevigne, and the rue de Jarente 52

4. Intersection of the rue de l'Abbaye, the rue Cardinale, the rue de l'Echaude, the passage de la Petite-Boucherie, and the rue Bourbon-le-Chateau 58

5. The quays surrounding the Pont-Neuf 66

6. Place Bernard Halpern 88

7. The Church of Saint-Severin 92.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 195-197) and index.

ISBN:

1565848683

1565848543

OCLC:

52047466