Images from Old France

By ROBERT HUGHES

Eugene Atget's camera recorded a vanished, rural world

One of the least prominent facts of cultural life 70 years ago was that few people expected to be famous. This was especially true in the "minor" arts, like photography. Today the schools are full of chickens with Nikons whose entire professional sense turns on the thought of stardom, however temporary that blessed state may be. Though most photography is routine, the air is so sodden with "creativity" and "expression" that the idea of being a journeyman photographer seems unthinkable. Hence the difficulty of understanding a career like Eugene Atget's.

Today, a lifetime after his death (he was born in 1857 and died in 1927), it would seem very rash to deny that Atget (pronounced At-jay) was one of the great artists of the 20th century. But there is nothing to suggest that he thought so himself. In his old age, he was much admired in the more advanced Parisian cultural circles; the surrealists, for instance, loved the mystery of his street scenes, with their pervasive sense that Something (the surrealist merveilleux) was about to break into the world round the corner, at the end of the perspective, out of scrutiny. But Atget said--or, at any rate, wrote--nothing about his own work; no statements of intention, no aesthetic positions. He was so reluctant to display any portion of his private life that he neglected, or refused, to photograph even Valentine Compagnon, the woman who lived with him for more than 30 years. In short, his conduct was that of a small tradesman: a commercial photographer, which he was, rather than a "genius," which he also was.

He had set himself the literally endless task of making photographs, some on commission and others ad lib, of France, especially the part of France that lay in Paris and within a radius of 50 miles around it. They were not meant to be tourist views--he never, for instance, photographed that most distinctive of all Parisian "sights," the Eiffel Tower. Nor were they meant to reveal spectacular oddities; there are no extreme closeups, wrenching details or aerial views in Atget, and the lens of his old-fashioned camera was always pitched at the height of a small man. Consistently, his work declares that anyone might have seen this motif, this sight.

One of his most matter-of-fact images is of an orange tree, the fruit dully glistening with the heavy shine of late summer, some leaves almost metallic in density, others a little blurred as the wind stirs them. Into this ecstatically concrete world, a ghost intrudes: the shadow of Atget and his shrouded camera falling across a cabbage plant. Mere shades that whisper "I was here" and so wrench the image away from objectivity toward that sense of mutual dependence between viewer and view that lay at the heart of modernism.

But it is only one of perhaps 10,000 photos, and in the remaining 9,999 Atget does not appear. Half of them were saved by the young American photographer Berenice Abbott, who saw them in 1925, bought some 5,000 prints and plates, and befriended the old man in his last years. Abbott's collection made its way to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and--after twelve years of intense research--it forms the basis of the largest show MOMA has ever given to a photographer. The first installment of this four-part affair is on view now. It deals not with Atget's images of Paris but of small towns and provincial countryside: Old France.

What we see in them is an attitude to experience that has now all but vanished. In Atget's time, the past still wound into the present. Tourism, "picturesqueness," antique hunting, all the mechanisms whereby anything more than 25 years old is isolated and denied continuity--their impact was hardly felt, as yet. Old things in rural contexts, a stone wellhead, a church wall, the darkly private door of a sagging farmhouse, tended less to be seen in quotation marks, as souvenirs of something irretrievable. They were there and were used; they implied a continuous relationship between society and its artifacts. This relationship, now lost to us, is what Atget photographed--at least to the extent that any photograph can depict something as abstract as relationship. It is one of the central ideas of his work, and it unfolds in almost every print; it is implicit in photos of vines trained up a wall, of espaliered trees, of two rustic chairs mysteriously engulfed by hop-vines. Nature plus labor equals culture: this is the equation (not as simple as it looks) his photographs constantly enunciate. They do so laconically. Take away the prosaic tin can from the wellhead in Atget's photo of a farming family in their courtyard at Sceaux, and one would have a softer image of peasants. That object connects their world to ours, abolishing the picturesque timelessness of their glimpsed lives.

Atget was not a social recorder all the time, and many of his best images are of the single object, a thing in itself, conveyed in the most subtly pictorial manner. His photo of an apple tree in a bare winter field, circa 1898, has a wild, precise intensity whose only parallel, in painting, must be the apple trees painted by Mondrian as a young man. When he photographed a motif a second or third time (as he often did, sometimes decades apart), the images, of village houses in Chatenay or trees in the park at St.-Cloud, each announces its specific qualities of light, reflection, time of day, angle of sight. Atget knew, as the impressionists knew, that the amount of reality any object can disclose is inexhaustible. But his work never succumbed to impressionist softness or generalization. Its tone is one of thoughtful clarity. The old root is not a symbol of old age; it is just wood, under light, put through a lens, chemically fixed. But the action of seeing it aright gathers so much meaning that Atget's photography can reasonably be called a moral act. As MOMA'S curator of photography, John Szarkowski, remarks in his admirable catalogue essay, "Atget's implicit confidence in the continuity and authority of culture was almost old-fashioned even in the time of his youth." But his peculiar and marvelous achievement was to have transferred that belief in continuity to the act of photographing, and to have shown it belonged there, just as it belonged to writing, sculpture or painting. In his hands photography shed its last vestiges of novelty, and became the indelible but fragmented form of cultural memory itself.

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