Max Norman's "Quoting the World"

Eugène Atget, Pontoise, Place du Grand Martroy (1902)

Max Norman’s “Quoting the World,” in this month’s New York Review of Books, is an excellent review of the exhibition “Eugène Atget: The Making of a Reputation,” at the International Center of Photography, New York. Norman observes that Atget’s photos of the deserted streets of old Paris “still breathe mystery a century after his death.” He says they are “blissfully unburdened by ideas or narratives or even a discernible style.”

I think this is essentially true. Atget’s photos are enigmatic. But do they lack style? Anthony Lane, in his 1994 New Yorker essay on Atget, 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.

Lane identifies several key elements of Atget’s style:

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.

There is something tense and poised in the decorum of an Atget composition: the camera tends to be tucked down low on its tripod, affording a broad and vulnerable angle, rather than the tight command of a lofted viewpoint. 

His lens never flinched from clutter, of course—from the crust of grime on a stately façade, from unreadable posters peeling off a wall—but the gaze that he levelled at it was clean, wholly immune to the many-angled, tight-nerved scrutiny of the modernists.

That is one reason his work has barely dated: you can fill it with Frenchness—any kind you like, from whatever period, according to taste. It beckons you into its unexceptional landscapes, its well-stocked but crowdless shops, and your gaze is free to wander, because there’s no one else around.

And Lane makes this crucial point: 

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 its daily drama was played out. Atget stopped to absorb the detail that others failed to notice, but he couldn’t have cared less about seeing the sights. Not once, in almost forty years behind a camera, did he point it at the Eiffel Tower.

Atget stopped to absorb the detail that others failed to notice – right there, I think, is Atget’s governing aesthetic.