Eugene Atget: Unknown Paris FROM THE PUBLISHER
In the twentieth century, two photographers. Berenice Abbott and Eugene Atget, were able to truly capture the spirit of the cities in which they lived. Thanks to the efforts of Abbott -- who drew inspiration from Atget and went on to replicate his work in her native New York -- Atget's negatives were salvaged, and his reputation preserved for posterity. Her famous images of New York City comprise Berenice Abbott: Changing New York, published by The New Press. Now, this companion volume presents a wealth of previously unpublished material by Eugene Atget himself.
During the first quarter of the twentieth century, the short, stocky figure of photographer Eugene Atget was a familiar sight in Paris. From 1898 until his death in 1927, Atget took approximately five thousand negatives in the city, systematically documenting its historic core: its buildings and monuments, its ancient streets and civic spaces, its public parks and gardens. Atget chose not to represent a particular site by a single, definitive photograph: instead he consistently produced sequences of interrelated images to create a cumulative portrait of each setting.
Featuring 240 of Atget's photographs -- only a few of which have previously been published -- this book examines Atget's approach to photography by studying these sequences: his pictures of an individual building, a street, an intersection, the quays along the river Seine, and a neighborhood. Assembling these images into coherent groups. Unknown Paris displays the direct and integral relationship between the photographer's working method and his subject matter, in turn revealing the distinctive character of old Paris itself.
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