Book review: Szarkowski, John. Atget. NY: The Museum of Modern Art, 2000.

The book begins with an 8-page introduction covering what little we know of Atget’s life (“Scholars have pummeled and shaken them [the facts] without mercy, but for the most part they have stood mute.”), and historical details about the the photographic process within the photographer's lifetime.   Although known towards the end of his life as reliant on outdated technology, when Atget began his photographic career he did so at a technological turning point.  No longer was it necessary for camera operators to treat their own plates and paper.  These were now manufactured and could be purchased from suppliers of photographic equipment.  What this meant was greater geographical range for the photographer, who no longer had to carry with him a small chemist’s shop.  Szarkowski sees this technical development as having opened up the range of photographic subjects.  It was now easy to travel about and shoot most anything and everything.  Another technical development of the period was the ability to print photos on ordinary paper, but as Atget never worked for the popular press, this advance seems to have hardly impinged on his photographic career.


As Szarkowski observes later in the book, while many people consider Atget a 19th century photographer, the bulk of his work is from the 20th, and result of these two advances was to make photography something practiced in the majority by amateurs, while making a select number of professional photographs available to very large audiences.

Atget worked for a more narrowly defined market and as such did not have to worry much about public taste.  He did, though, still have to take into account the taste and demands of his clients. “...the historical fact is that the lot of the professional photographer has seldom been a happy one.”

Atget was, then, in the narrowest sense a commercial photographer, and was certainly not part of the world of art photography, which Szarkowski notes came to be increasingly defined by motive or intention.  But according to Berenice Abbott, he rarely worked on assignment, insisting that customers did not know what to photograph.  In this regard he worked almost entirely on speculation. (p74)

Szarkowski sees the appeal of Atget in his ability to show us “an unfamiliar world.”  His pictures, he finds, are honest, unpretentious, and strong:  “They are disinterested - free of special pleading.  They are brave -in that sense that (we feel sure) nothing is made to look either better or worse that it looked to the photographer.  They are dead-on accurate - in the sense that they allow us to know these scenes will never again look as they look in the pictures.  They are as clear as good water, as plain and nourishing as good bread.” (p19)

The remainder of the volume is made up of 100 plates, each image printed on the right facing page.  On the left are a couple hundred words from Szarkowski, providing forensic evidence from the photo, or giving a bit of historical background on the subject or the photographer.  The plates range in dates from the late 19th century to 1925, two years before his death, and cover all of Atget’s major subjects and themes, from rural landscapes to the streets and gardens of Paris. The reproductions are quite handsome, the paper silky and not too light.

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