#art, #photography, Eugène Atget

You could say he photographed the Paris of his day, (the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th Century), the architecture, the streets, the street scenes and then was completely forgotten… Eugène was born one February 12, 1857 en Libourne, France… In 1878 he moved to Paris to study Theatre, but he was inducted into the Army and was expulsed from the school. However he did become an actor and joined an itinerant group where he met the woman who would be his partner… After suffering an infection in his vocal chords he stopped acting and in 1887 moved to the provinces to try his hand at painting. He did not succeed. Then in 1888 he began to take photographs. His first ones, dating from 1888, are from Amiens and Beauvais… In 1890 Atget returned to Paris, now as a professional photographer. By 1898 the Museum Carnavalet and the Bibliothèque Historique de la ville de Paris were purchasing his photographs. He was commissioned to photograph, systematically, the historic buildings of Paris. In 1899 he relocated to Montparnasse… Berenice Abbott, who at the time was working with Man Ray, visited Atget (1925) and bought some of his photographs. Although she tried to promote his work, Atget fell into obscurity. Abbott sold her collection of Atget photographs to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 1968… In 1927, looking slightly bent, sad, distant yet attractive, Atget died on the 4th of August.

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Atget died in poverty and alone. He was re-discovered in France in the 1980’s. The Bibliothèque National de Paris held a retrospective of his workin 2007. In 2019 eleven of his photographs were exhibited within a Berenice Abbott exhibition produced by the Fundación Mapfre in their exhibition halls in Madrid and Barcelona.

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