by Owen Haney ’14. Arguments abound the work of La père Atget, or “Father Atget,” as Man Ray fondly (with a touch of condescension) dubbed the Parisian photographer. Contemporary critics struggle to classify Atget’s late-nineteenth-century photographs as surrealist, modernist, or something else entirely. After all, it was only at the end of his life that […]
Eugène Atget, Cour, 28 Rue Bonaparte, Paris, 1910
by Andrea Rosen, Curator of Under the Surface. The ability of Eugène Atget’s images of streets, shop windows, and parks to seem at once straightforward and uncanny was admired by the surrealists. Atget spent his thirty-year career documenting Old Paris, taking thousands of photographs that he primarily sold to libraries and archives. In the 1920s Man Ray […]
Eugène Atget, Cour, 28 Rue Bonaparte, Paris, 1910
by Claire Aasen ’14. In considering what constitutes surrealism, I found all of Atget’s photographs compelling; it is interesting to me that Atget himself did not consider his work “surrealist.” He saw himself as a maker of documents, and it was other, more assuredly surrealist artists like Man Ray who first applied the term to […]