In 2011, Fundacion Mapfre, the cultural division of the international insurance company, held an exhibition in its elegant palazzo in one of Madrid's main roads to show the entire collection of photographs taken by Eugene Atget of a Paris that is now no more.
Eugène Atget, in full Jean-Eugène-Auguste Atget, (born 12 February 1857, Libourne, near Bordeaux, France - died 4 August 1927, Paris), was a French commercial photographer who specialised in photographing the architecture and associated arts of Paris and its environs at the turn of the 20th century.
This is that part of Paris that had not yet seen the great architectural renovation done by Baron Haussmann, who created all those wide majestic boulevards. Instead, we have a Paris of old roads, dilapidated buildings but still enlivened by touches of the Belle Epoque.
It is a Paris devoid of people, almost a ghost city, but at the same time a Paris we can still find in the odd nooks that still exist here and there. You see a photo and after looking at it for some time, you realize you know that place, although today in a vastly different context.
Atget left some disciples, notably Henri Cartier Bresson.
His declared intention - this was at the birth of photography - was to document Paris as it was at the turn of the century (from the 19th to the 20th century) before it changed forever.
Photography at that time was still at its beginnings: the volume contains towards the end a detailed description of cameras, plates, photographic paper, etc.
At one point (unfortunately the book fails to tell us the date) Atget wrote to the Minister of Culture of the time, presenting himself as a photographer-archaeologist, and telling him of the immense number of photos he had taken of civil architecture of the 16th to 19th centuries, old palaces, historical mansions, beautiful shop windows, old fountains, old staircases, the interiors of all the churches of Paris, artistic details from Notre Dame, Saint-Gervais, Saint-Severin, Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, etc.
He also told him how much he had already disposed of - entire collections given to the National Museum, others sold to the London Great Library,
He collected his photos by theme - landscapes, topography, art in old Paris, etc.
The Paris he presents is a Paris without people, almost a ghost city, but it is a Paris we can still perceive - shop windows, restaurants, and old alleys and streets, courtyards of the nobility and of the common people, doorways, doorknobs, and internal rooms, for example of the old Austrian embassy. Yet another section includes statuary that most probably can still be found, for example in the Jardin du Luxembourg or the Tuilleries.
Eugene Atget: El Viejo Paris
Fundacion Mapfre
2011
346pp