Art: Yesterday Paris

• Share

No one knew turn-of-the-century Paris better than Photographer Eugene Atget. He trudged its boulevards and back alleys, aiming his antique box camera at the sidewalks, the rooftops, the chestnut trees, the shop windows and the people. Passers-by suspected him of being a lunatic or even a spy. Artier photographers ridiculed him as a crackpot and tasteless hack. Among the few to appreciate his work as time went by was U.S. Photographer Berenice Abbott.

Last week Photographer Abbott, who bought up the photographs and plates Atget left behind at his death in 1927, was displaying 200 of the best of them at Manhattan's New School for Social Research. Atget's 30 years of patient trudging and clicking added up to a splendid historical document of a yesterday Paris.

Printed on softly highlighted gold chloride paper, the photographs showed with equal clarity Paris' elegant mansions and lean-to shanties, her fashionably dressed strollers and her ragpickers. Among the finest: a warmhearted study of a blind organ grinder accompanying a bright-faced young street singer, deadpan views of the cluttered windows of a toupee maker and hairdresser, sailor-hatted moppets at play in the Luxembourg Gardens, a plump bakery girl in leg-of-mutton sleeves pushing her wicker cart, a crew of pavers at work on a Paris street.

Atget never replaced his old-fashioned camera, scorned such new photographic developments as filters, adjustable lenses and high-speed film. In his old age he lived in a bare Paris flat, ate nothing but bread, milk and an occasional lump of sugar. But he still found energy to go out each morning at dawn, lug his bulky equipment up a fountain or statue if he could get a better view. By the time he died, at 70, he had snapped his favorite city some 10,000 times, not once found her dull.