Customer Reviews

Atget: Paris (French Edition)

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This book is perhaps one of the most wonderful collections of photographs that I have ever had the pleasure of owning. Eugène Atget, a failed actor, painter, sailor, and soldier, eventually settled on photography as a career some thirty-odd years into his life, and set out to make a photographic record of the whole of Paris at the end of the nineteenth century. By 1920, some 4,000 negatives existed, from which many have been culled for the present volume.

Of course, as cities, go, Paris, like London or Rome, has perhaps more than its share of photogenic sites. However, oddly enough, considering that these photos are more than three quarters of a century old, no book has ever reproduced the experience of Paris more to my taste than this collection of Atget's work. Organised by arrondissement (the subsections into which the whole of Paris is divided), the book offers a systematic voyage past landmarks familiar and unfamiliar. Images of the Jardin des Tuilleries, Notre Dame, the Palais du Louvre, the Champs-Elysées and so many other familiar names and places are here. Faces of long-dead Parisians stare out from streets now populated by their descendants. It is as though the very images, bathed in light now a century gone, come to life in these photos. All the majesty and squalor, the beauty and degradation of a great city; these things are all captured by Atget's lens. The effect is moving and eerie, and suits what is arguably the Continent's greatest city down to the ground.

And, on a strictly personal note, one of my favourite photos is taken from the 17th Arrondissement, in the Quartier des Ternes. It is of a café in the Avenue de la Grande-Armée, dated 1924 or 1925, empty chairs and tables bathed in sunlight, and an advert for Bass Extra Stout painted on the window! Truly a sublime moment.

Do yourself a favour, if you enjoy old photographs or love Paris, or both. Find a copy of this book, and enjoy it on those days when you can't actually be there.

Granted, this may be the most extensive collection of Atget's Paris work in one volume, but the quality of the photographic reproductions leaves a lot to be desired. Although not as exhaustive, Andreas Krase's "Atget's Paris" contains beautiful, high- quality reproductions of a large number of Atget's Paris photos. The Krase book also contains a very well written and informative essay on Atget's personal history and work. For true Atget junkies, you may want to own both; but if you can only have one, or if you want the one that best "transports" you into Atget's paris, go for the Krase book. ...and finally for real buffs of old Paris photos (especially pre-Hausmannization), you may try to seek out the work of the photographer Marville (good luck, unfortunately it seems his stuff is out-of-print at present), or the Panaromanic Photograph collection in the "American Memory" collection of the Library of Congress...

It appears that some reviews may be referring to previous edtions of this classic volume on Atget. The latest (2007) edition is printed and bound in a far superior volume. The photographic reproductions along with the paper and binding are both greatly improved. Highly recommended.

I was recommended this book by a valued friend who loved this. I can understand his opinion, Atget took lovely pictures of a world that seems beautiful in a ghostly way. People in that world weren't tall and pretty but there is photographic beauty in their pictures. And the streets always seem incredibly empty and misty and dusty. Is this really the city that was huge and vibrant already back then?

The pictures are lovely and interesting. And the book is very, very thick and contains a massive amount of Atget's photos, but the book is only about the normal pocket-book size, so when there are pages with even two pictures, the photos are bound to be small. At the same time I found a French edition of a series of French master photographers in the art-book size and it really brought up these photos better. But I got this book used through Amazon in a ridiculously low price and it's not exactly a bad edition. The pictures are on quality paper and there are so many of them that you'll spend many nights flicking through this book. It just could be bigger...