Eugène Atget (Masters of Photography) - Hardcover

Eugène Atget photographed the city of Paris and its environs obsessively for almost thirty years. He discovered a market for documentary photographs of Old Paris, which were bought by artists as source material for their canvases. But for Atget, the production of photographs about old French culture was also an occasion for making art.

His photographs are unparalleled in their lucid realism and their lyrical response to the living pulse of the city and to artifacts that speak of human life in almost every social class. His images of parks, lakes, shop windows, vendors, prostitutes, buildings, sculpture, street scenes of Paris, go beyond mere documentation to a poetic vision of a time gone by. Atget created some of the most beautifully articulated images of light and space ever made with a camera-- an imaginary world.

Born in 1857 in Bordeaux, Eugène Atget was the son of a carriage maker, but was soon orphaned and went to live with an uncle. He studied at the Conservatory of the French National Theatre in Paris, and after a number of years working as an actor, he turned to photography at the age of forty-two. He rapidly became absorbed in a documentary project which, over the last thirty years of his life, resulted in more than ten thousand glass-plate negatives of turn-of-the-century Paris and its rural environs. Atget's photographs are now considered early masterpieces of photographic realism. He died in 1927 at the age of seventy in Paris.