Favorite Photo Reviews 3: Anthony Lane's "A Balzac of the Camera"

Eugène Atget, Café, Boulevard Montparnasse, 6th and 14th Arrondissement (1925)

This is the eighth post in my “Favorite Photo Reviews” series. Today’s pick is Anthony Lane’s “A Balzac of the Camera” (The New Yorker, April 25, 1994; retitled “Eugène Atget,” in his great 2002 essay collection Nobody’s Perfect).   

It’s a review of Atget Paris, a fat paperback of Eugène Atget photos published in 1992 by Hazan/Ginkgo Press. Lane writes,

There is no mistaking an Atget photograph, but no easy means of describing it, either; he seems to impose no style, and yet no one else, faced with the same scene, could ever have arrived at the same likeness. He is known, sometimes dismissively, for the conjuring of atmosphere; this book directs you to his mastery of line as well. (It’s worth recalling that Walker Evans and Ansel Adams were among Atget’s earliest fans.) The edges of his buildings are pure and hard, unbothered by background fuss, but as you look into the distance the light relaxes into a feathery haze. You are left with the extraordinary sensation that perspective is a matter not only of space but of time: in front of your eyes it is high noon, but day seems to be breaking at the end of every street.

Lane says that it was Atget’s lifework “to capture Paris in photographs.” He says,

His prey was more elusive than you might expect - not the proud, orderly streets planned by Haussmann but all that was ignored in that grand design: the arcana of the old city, its brothels and doorways and dirty fountains, the stages on which the daily drama was played out. Atget stopped to absorb the detail that others failed to notice, but he couldn’t have cared less about the seeing the sights. Not once, in almost forty years behind the camera, did he point it at the Eiffel Tower.

Atget stopped to absorb the detail that others failed to notice - how I love that line! It’s one of my favourites in all of art criticism. Stopping to absorb the detail that others failed to notice is exactly what great artists do. It’s one of their prime impulses. This piece by Lane is one of my touchstones.