Rue Awakening

The year was 1897, and Paris was in peril. Nearly every day, another of its graceful old alleys, passageways, churches, shops, hôtels particuliers, fortifications, fountains and other charmingly decrepit fixtures fell to the wreckers’ ball. Napoléon III and his architect Baron Haussmann — with their vision of an imposing, rectilinear city — had launched the orgy of destruction, and the advance of the new Métro system was finishing the job. Soon, it seemed, the Paris of Abelard and Héloïse, Voltaire and Molière, Balzac and Hugo would be a dusty memory, surviving only in literature and paintings.

From the untidy, artist-infested neighborhood of Montparnasse stepped an unlikely savior: Eugène Atget. A failed actor and painter then pushing 40, he had picked up a camera a few years earlier and started a meager trade providing stock photographs to artists. Over the next 30 years, Atget systematically captured what he called “the old Paris” in some 10,000 photos of remarkable intelligence and poignancy. In the process, he helped transform photography into a serious art form, becoming one of its founding giants.

Now France’s Bibliothèque Nationale, home to more than 5,000 of Atget’s albumen prints and glass negatives, is mounting the first major look at the artist’s work in at least a quarter century — and the first ever in France. “Atget, a Retrospective,” until July 1 at the library’s Richelieu center in Paris, marks the 150th anniversary of the artist’s birth and the 80th of his death. The show offers 350 scenes of a vanished era: quiet courtyards, bustling squares, manicured parks, crumbling cornices and balustrades, placid river barges and enticing shop fronts, as well as strollers, street hawkers and sleeping drunks. Many of the pictures have never been exhibited before, and all but one were printed by the photographer himself. Together they form an impressively confident and distinctive body of work.

If you stand back and squint, you might think you were looking at paintings by, say, Utrillo or Vlaminck — delicate streetscapes suffused with morning light and dusky melancholy. Indeed, those artists, along with Picasso, Braque, Matisse and Derain, were among Atget’s contemporary admirers. The Surrealists adopted him as one of their own, enchanted by his gaudy fairgrounds and prostitutes, his near-abstract depictions of stonework and staircases, and the way he sometimes reflected his own image in store windows. Later photographic greats — Edward Weston, Walker Evans, Ansel Adams — admired his ability to combine straightforward documentation with almost painterly finesse.

Atget arrived on the scene at a crucial moment not just for Paris, but also for photography. Cameras were becoming less cumbersome, glass plates were giving way to film, and new chemicals and techniques were broadening the photographer’s palette. Atget mostly shunned these advances, using a bulky, large-format view camera on a tripod — and never any artificial light, even for interiors. He figured exposure times in his head — a relatively glacial 1/11th of a second was typical — and learned how to narrow the aperture to ensure that both background and foreground remained in focus. His genius lay in making a picture look artfully composed yet breathlessly immediate: what Evans called his “lyrical understanding of the street.”

Atget developed that understanding by prowling the streets in search of architectural details to photograph for his artist clients. His 1897 decision to document an endangered Paris coincided with the city’s formation of a preservation commission to help rescue its disappearing landscape. Without official sanction Atget pitched in, setting off at dawn and working his way outward in concentric circles from the city center. He assembled his prints in albums, which he sold to local museums, galleries and the Bibliothèque Nationale. “Carrying his heavy and outmoded equipment on his back, casually and poorly dressed, he became himself a picturesque figure,” write curators Sylvie Aubenas and Guillaume Le Gall in the show’s sumptuous catalogue. Indeed, during World War I some passersby suspected Atget of being a spy, and he chose to lie low for a while.

While Atget’s work is enjoyably accessible, Atget the man remains an underexposed negative. An orphan, he was raised by an uncle in Bordeaux and worked as a cabin boy on transatlantic steamers before trying his hand at acting and painting. He retained his bohemian affection for the working man, and — much like French foes of globalization today — worried about the petty tradesmen and merchants threatened by modernization and the rise of big Paris department stores. Thus, the Bibliothèque Nationale show includes affectionate portraits of herb sellers, junk dealers and wine merchants, as well as shots of the horse-drawn buses and cabriolets that were vanishing as the automotive age dawned.

Atget was said to be short-tempered and eccentric, and in his 50s stopped eating anything except bread, milk and sugar. He and his wife, Valentine, a former actress, hung out with some of Paris’ leading dramatists — though he left behind not a single portrait of friends or associates. One photo in the show gives a tiny insight into the photographer’s world: Small Interior of a Dramatic Artist, which is actually Atget’s own tidy, book-lined apartment.

The exhibit has another revealing picture, the only one not printed or shot by Atget himself. It is a 1927 portrait of him, looking stooped and weary at age 70, by an American friend, Berenice Abbott. When she stopped by his flat a few months later to deliver it, he was dead. His passing went largely unmarked outside the circle of curators who had bought his albums and kept them interred, mostly unseen, in their archives. Atget would likely have been indifferent to such obscurity, given his preference for work over fame. “This enormous artistic and documentary collection is now finished,” he wrote of his life’s work in 1920, though he kept on shooting for years. “I can now say that I possess all of the old Paris.”

Abbott was the key that unlocked Atget’s Paris for the rest of the world. She got to know him in the 1920s when she was an assistant to Atget’s Montparnasse neighbor Man Ray, the photographer and Surrealist. Abbott went on to become an eminent photographer herself, capturing the old neighborhoods of New York City, Atget-style, as they fell to the skyscraper. After Atget’s death, she arranged for New York City’s Museum of Modern Art to buy many of his prints. Atget soon became better known in the U.S. than in the land of his birth, an imbalance the Bibliothèque Nationale show may finally correct.

Anyone familiar with today’s Paris will make a happy discovery at the Bibliothèque Nationale: a surprising number of the streets and buildings Atget photographed have survived mostly intact. Atget’s role in protecting them is difficult to quantify — but impossible to deny. The skill and passion he brought to that quest make “Atget, a Retrospective” not just a nostalgic trip back to a lost era, but also a living road map to one of the most romantic cities in the world. It is a city, as Atget realized, that cries out to be photographed.