An Introduction to Atget’s Photographs of Everyday Paris

In the J. Paul Getty Museum’s newly opened exhibition “The Man in the Street: Eugene Atget in Paris,” a 1920 photograph taken in the gardens at Versailles is classic Atget. A melancholic mood of transition and loss infuses the picture.

“The Park, Versailles” centers on an alley of trees, their barren branches outlined against a wintry sky. At the right in the foreground stands a half-figure statue of the Roman goddess of the harvest, Ceres, who clutches a lush bouquet of wheat sheaves at her side. Her pedestal is anchored in dirt, while long, parallel, late-afternoon shadows of the statue and an adjacent tree lead your eye back into the empty alley and to a silvery gray infinity beyond. An ancient symbol for reaping the rewards of nature’s bounty seems bereft and abandoned, while the beautiful desolation of France’s former royal park echoes against a remnant of a lost past.

Atget photographed “The Park, Versailles” in virtual obscurity as an artist--just as he did the urban storefronts, workers and Parisian neighborhoods that are chronicled in the exhibition’s often exquisite prints. He made his now-famous pictures of Paris for business purposes. He sold pictures as location studies to be used by painters, architects, illustrators, set designers, historians--anyone in need of reliable information about what the city, its environs and ordinary inhabitants looked like. The door to his fifth-floor apartment and darkroom advertised his photographic services with a hand-lettered sign: “Documents for artists.”

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The Getty show, assembled by associate curator Gordon Baldwin, presents Atget’s work in loosely defined groups. One wall includes images taken at Versailles, another is composed from pictures of the merchandise in shop windows, a third looks at workers (ranging from a wary ragpicker to a grinning prostitute) and so on. Over the course of 30 years, from 1897 to his death at age 60 in 1927, Atget made thousands of photographs--some 8,500 negatives survive--and each subject category was cataloged in an archive of hundreds of photographs. (American photographer Berenice Abbott saved them for posterity, and her tender portrait of a frail Atget shortly before his death is also in the show.) The 65 Atgets on view in two Getty galleries, selected from among 295 in the museum’s holdings, are but a tiny tip of a very large iceberg.

It’s helpful to think of the photographer in the way his actor friend, Andre Calmettes, did. As Calmettes so aptly described him, Atget was a collector. Using glass-plate negatives and a view camera mounted on a tripod, he stopped to collect otherwise fleeting images of what a Parisian pedestrian would see in passing, on daily perambulations around the city. Frequently, as in “The Park, Versailles,” the transitoriness of the scene is enhanced by a forlorn poignancy of great lyric beauty.

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What’s peculiar about the Getty show--aside from the odd choice of robin’s egg blue for walls on which often melancholy prints hang--is that it’s less a special exhibition in the traditional sense than a simple selection of representative works from the museum’s permanent collection. There is no catalog to accompany the show; instead, 50 Atget photographs are discussed in a new paperback volume that is part of the museum’s “In Focus” series, which looks at aspects of the collection.

The Getty’s holdings are rich enough in Atget’s work to be able to provide, without loans, a pleasant introduction to the well-known photographer. But, absent a curatorial reinterpretation of the photographs and their place in 20th century art, this is a presentation that will principally be of interest to those unfamiliar with the remarkable Atget, or those who wish to see an array of a favorite artist’s work one more time.

Concurrent to the Atget display, the museum is also showing 37 photographs by various artists from among the 500 images acquired through purchase or gift since the Getty Center opened in December 1997. It completes the Atget show’s emphasis on the museum as an important collector of major photographs.

* “The Man in the Street: Eugene Atget in Paris,” J. Paul Getty Museum, 1200 Getty Center Drive, (310) 440-7300, through Oct. 8. Parking reservations required. Closed Monday.