Book review: Badger, Gary. Atget 55. London: Phadon Press, 2001.

This volume is one in a series of pocket-sized books on masters of photography based on the concept of 55 representative images..  History and context is provided here by Gerry Badger, a photographer, curator, and teacher of photographic history at Brighton University.  Badger is the author of the book accompanying the BBC series The Genius of Photography.  I cannot now find writing credits for the series and don’t know if he was involved with that as well, or only the book.

Badger’s 13-page introduction is framed as The Atget Problem:  what exactly does his photography represent?  The ex-thespian described himself as a creator of documents, but has since been hailed as a founding father of modern photography.  Because he had so little to say, he left behind much to discuss.  Badger sees the Atget Problem as a mirror of the problem of photography:  what exactly is documentary photography?

Badgers believes much of Atget’s work is slightly off-key, eccentric, particularly in relation to his competitors.  His use of a wide angle lens sometimes distorted verticals and he wasn’t concerned about extraneous elements in his images.  He didn’t photograph the upper classes, nor much of the lower. He worked in environments decidedly middle class to which he had easy access.


Badger sees in Atget’s own words the key to understanding his work.  “I can safely say that I possess all of old Paris.”  Certainly, he did not posses all, as has been noted.  He wandered and worked in a somewhat circumscribed circle, “pedestrian, working class, a largely pre-industrial, small-scale,  disregarded Paris of narrow streets and hidden courts.”  The key word here is possess, and Badger sees Atget’s work as one of collecting, through a “peculiarly receptive, feeling eye,” his personal experience of Paris.

That experience was one of a pedestrian.  Badger notes how his photos “invite a somewhat leisurely, contemplative stroll” (p50) and that the sense of space is usually expansive. His images were typically shot from eye level and “took in ‘ordinary’ point of view.” (p56)  He often took the least direct route to a subject, perhaps to see what there was to be discovered along the way.  (p86)

Badger quotes John Fraser on the essential quality of Atget as a photographer presenting “certain basic aspects of the city as they impinged on someone actually living in it in an ordinary way.”  (p114)

Badger quotes Tod Papageorge to describe much of Atget’s work:  “There is nothing so mysterious as a fact clearly described.”  It seems, however, this should be attributed to Gary Winogrand.  The book contains no footnotes or endnotes and so no way to verify quotes except through google.

Compared with other Atget volumes, this one has two distinct disadvantages:  the size and length.  Book dimensions are approximately 16x14cm at 128 pages.  The photos are printed full page, with a couple hundred words comment on the left facing page, but even so they are rather small and there are only 55.  The selection is judicious, providing an interesting, but very small, sampling of the thousand of extant images.  The small size, on the other, means the book is easily portable and inexpensive, which may be a consideration for those who want to sample before splurging.  The printing is of a good quality, and the paper stock similar to large, glossy photobooks, though the binding is glue and the cover on my copy already separating from the pages after only a couple of days use.

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