Preserving Paris : Eugene Atget’s photographs capturing life in the City of Light from 1915-1927 are restored for exhibit at the J. Paul Getty Museum

From the turn of the century until just before his death in 1927, Frenchman Eugene Atget photographed scenes of Paris. With a unique eye, he in essence if not intent documented the city’s streets, architecture, storefronts and parks. American photographer Berenice Abbott said of him in her book, “The World of Atget”: “He will be remembered as an urban historian, a genuine romanticist, a lover of Paris, a Balzac of the camera, from whose work we can weave a large tapestry of French civilization.”

Tuesday, the J. Paul Getty Museum opens “Atget’s Magical Analysis: Photographs, 1915-1927,” an exhibition of about 50 prints that illustrate the moodiness and complexity of his late work.

In preparation for this show, Weston Naef, the Getty’s curator of photographs, invited French conservator Anne Cartier-Bresson to come to the museum to evaluate whether the prints need treatment to preserve them.

“These works are of quintessential importance to the cultural history of France. My policy is to have conservators who have been trained in the places where the photographs come from deal with the treatment of those works,” Naef said. “Anne has treated more Atget photographs than anyone in the world.”

Since 1983, Cartier-Bresson has been in charge of Paris’ conservation lab, established to preserve the photographs in the city’s various museums, libraries and archives. There are more than 12,000 Atget prints in the city’s collections.

“The aim of the city since the 1840s has been to document not only the history of Paris’ architecture and shops, but also of the people working there, famous or not,” Cartier-Bresson said in fluent English during a conversation at the Getty’s photography center in early July. “We have many other photographers’ work in the collections, and many prints by anonymous photographers that still have to be identified. We have so much material to preserve; when you see the collections of the city, you would go mad thinking of how many prints there are.”

Cartier-Bresson spent a month here beginning in June, dividing her time between working on the Getty’s Atget photographs and doing her own research as a guest conservator at the museum.

It was her first trip to the western part of the United States. “I like it here very much,” she said. “There is nothing like it. What I really appreciate is that people here are so cooperative. Everybody tries to help, to give information. That’s not so European. People in Europe are often very protective of their work.”

In addition to doing research at the Getty library and touring its conservation labs, Cartier-Bresson met with photography curators there as well as at other institutions, and visited local museums such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Norton Simon Museum and the Huntington Library.

“Museums here are very interesting to visit because there really is more money for them than we have in Europe,” she said. “For us, it gives us different ideas about ways to organize things, and what we should do with archive facilities.”

Cartier-Bresson is the niece of renowned photojournalist Henri Cartier-Bresson, now in his 80s. “He’s drawing mostly now, and not much involved with photography,” Anne Cartier-Bresson said. “He did what he wanted to do in photography, and was brought back to drawing. Painting and drawing were his first interests when he was young.

“I have been looking at pictures since I was a kid. And I was interested in them because of my uncle, of course. I was probably impressed as a child when he showed his pictures, and by the way he would speak about life.” For her uncle, she said, the picture itself was less important than the life it recorded. “I like working on the material, on the picture.”

In the late 1970s, after completing a four-year master’s program in art conservation at the Sorbonne, Cartier-Bresson was doing an internship at the Bibliotheque National. There, she saw 19th-Century photographs for the first time, including prints of architecture and archeology, her principal fields of study before she began to focus on preserving paper and art.

“I knew then that I wanted to start something on the conservation of photographs,” she said. “I was most interested in the material aspects and techniques of 19th-Century prints. I thought it was so much more beautiful to see the originals than reproductions, and that we should preserve them.”

Cartier-Bresson said that at that time very few people in France knew what photography conservation was, so she came to the United States to study in the field. She spent a year at the George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y., and then in Ottawa, Canada, working on conservation problems at the National Archives. Then she went to Chicago to work at the Albumen Works.

“That’s where I learned the old techniques of albumen and salted paper printing,” she said. “The more I looked at 19th-Century prints, the more I understood that it’s not only the historical aspects of a print that are significant; the technical process is very important from an aesthetic point of view, and a reproduction is just nothing. That is, it is something else. You’ve got the information, but not the object in a reproduction.”

Returning to Paris after her stay in North America, Cartier-Bresson wrote a doctoral thesis on the structure, technical and historical aspects, and restoration of salted paper prints in France. “Salted paper printing is one of the major processes we had in the 1840s through the 1860s,” she said. “Even if the daguerreotype print was invented in France, the whole French school of photography of the mid-1800s was the collotype and salted paper print. They were the best. It’s different because you don’t have many salted paper prints here. It’s a process that did not take root in the United States.”

Soon after she finished her thesis in 1983, Paris’ cultural affairs department decided to establish a photography conservation lab, the first public facility of its kind in France. Cartier-Bresson was asked to head the Atelier de Restauration des Photographies , and since then she has been in charge of the monumental tasks of identifying, organizing, treating and properly storing hundreds of thousands of photographs.

During her recent stay at the Getty, she presented a lecture on Paris’ photographic collections and her work at the atelier. She spoke of old prints marred by mold or eaten by insects. Some photographs bore the mark of a person’s footprint. A portrait of Daguerre that was hidden away in an attic is now one of the major items in the city’s collection.

“This has been the lot of photography collections, both personal and in museums, until recently,” Cartier-Bresson said. “Our major work has been to stop the deterioration to preserve the prints, to think of good conservation programs on a general basis for all of the collections,” Cartier-Bresson said.

“It’s a much more important issue for the future of those materials than to work on just a few projects for restoration. We would like to be able to restore 20,000 photographs a year, but we can’t, so we have to choose what we do.

“And we don’t only work for the museums. I have many friends, young photographers, who ask me questions about technical aspects of prints and how photographers such as Atget made their prints. For the future, we work with photographers now to show them the processes, their differences, and the structure of materials.”

Cartier-Bresson added that she is very glad to be able to come to this country from time to time. “We are quite isolated in Europe. We still have to build a network of photography conservators, which we are working on. In France we are very few, so we are studying that idea with the English photography conservators. It will be built, but it’s very slow, so it’s important for us to have connections with the labs in the United States, which started photography conservation. I would say France is 10 years behind.”