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ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING: I don't remember when I first saw the work of
French photographer Eugene Atget, in what museum, in what city. Might
have been New York, might have been Paris. I might have been 14 or 23.
Wherever it was, however old I was, the images stayed with me, the moody
indelible images of Paris in the early years of the last century. I
have carried them ever since somewhere inside, in the bone, behind the
eye, at the back of the brain, wherever we put these things. Seeing
Atget's photographs again in this splendidly quiet new show at the Getty
Museum in Los Angeles was like a homecoming, a remembrance, if you will,
of things past, which is after all what Atget, himself, was all about--
remembering, archiving the city he so loved and through whose streets,
day after day, in those early years of the 1900's, he trudged with big-old
heavy tripod-mounted camera and a his even then old-fashioned glass
plate negatives.
He did not think of himself as an artist per se. He was interested
in making a record of the texture of his city: Parks, shop windows,
the ordinary streets where ordinary people came and went, strolled and
played and passed their often very hard lives. He took pictures, not
of the rich and famous, but of the rag- picker and metalworker. In short,
he had a political as well as a poetic eye. We've seen so much photography
lately. Arguably it is the art form for our age, our media-drenched
narcissistic age, if you will, reflecting back to us pictures of ourselves
and our world,, the visual analog to the memoirs everyone is writing.
But so often, the glossy, bossy images are skin deep, advertising copy.
They fend you off, the photographer's ego and the subject's ego crowding
out your own imagination. But with Atget, every deserted street and
every staircase is an invitation for your eye to wander down, your imagination.
They pull at you, invite you in.
You might catch a figure, a child at play, a face in a window like
a Vermeer painting. But they are in a way incidental, accidental, the
window dressing. You are the passerby, visual eavesdropper on time past,
on time itself. That's Atget's genius. What he's showing us through
his lens is that juncture of present and past, a present that is somehow
already past, a city already moving on, modernizing and leaving these
cobblestones, these store fronts, these bridges behind. People have
come and gone. You can hear the figment of their laughter as they disappear
out of frame around the corner, their angry chatter, their intimacies.
Everything in these photographs feels permanent and evanescent at the
same time. How impermanent seems my own great sprawling city by comparison.
To leave Atget's world for a moment and come back out here and gaze
down on L.A. is to hear the rock and roll of constant demolition and modernization.
We are not preservation minded. Will there be a record left behind of
this city, one with the fragile insistence of Atget's? Certainly he
did help show the way to other photographers. Walker Evans comes to
mind with his penchant for streets and signs and the stage sets for
daily life. Berenice Abbott, too, seems a kind of protégé.
She actually knew Atget when he was an old man, took this picture of
him. And her cityscapes of New York borrow in part from his photo affair
with Paris. The Getty, in fact, is showing a few of them along with
the Atget exhibit. But there is something singularly magic in the eye
of this man-- all right, existential, in the sense that he's showing
us Paris in the early 1900's, yes, but something more: Time itself in
a freeze frame. Here today, gone tomorrow. That's what you feel in here,
and it is both lonesome and exhilarating. I'm Anne Taylor Fleming.
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