Wednesday, January 4, 2017

Atget Duplicates the Real

Eugène Atget
Palais Royal
1904-05
albumen silver print
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

"What photographs by their sheer accumulation attempt to banish is the collection of death, which is part and parcel of every memory image. In the illustrated magazines the world has become a photographable present and the photographed present has been entirely eternalized. Seemingly ripped from the clutch of death, in reality it has succumbed to it."

 Siegfried Kracauer, from Photography (1927)

Eugène Atget
Fireplace, Austrian Embassy, Paris
ca. 1900
albumen print
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

"In the exact duplication of the Real, preferably by means of another reproductive medium  advertisement, photography, etc.  and in the shift from medium to medium, the real vanishes and becomes an allegory of death. But even in its moment of destruction it exposes and affirms itself; it will become the quintessential real and it becomes the fetishism of the lost object."

 Jean Baudrillard, from Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976), translated by Iaian Hamilton and published in English in 1993

Eugène Atget
Sculpted Bull's Head, fountain wall, Paris
ca. 1900
albumen print
Victoria & Albert Museum, London 

"Never before has an age been so informed about itself, if being informed means having an image of objects that resembles them in a photographic sense. In reality, however, the weekly photographic ration does not at all mean to refer to these objects or images. If it were offering itself as an aid to memory, then memory would have to make the selection. But the flood of photos sweeps away the dams of memory. . . . In the illustrated magazines people see the very world that the illustrated magazines prevent them from perceiving."

 Siegfried Kracauer, from Photography (1927)

Eugène Atget
Shop front, Quai Bourbon, Paris
ca. 1900
albumen print
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Eugène Atget
Shop sign, Quai Bourbon, Paris
ca. 1900
albumen print
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Do not speak to people about death
Do not speak words that disappear like smoke
You cannot look at death
When (you think you look at death)
what you find there are ashes only.

 Nakagiri Masao, translated by Naoki Sakai (quoted in Translation and Subjectivity, University of Minnesota Press, 1967)

Eugène Atget
Marble copy of the Belvedere Cleopatra, Versailles
ca. 1900
albumen print
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Eugène Atget
Neo-Attic relief known as the Borghese Dancers, Louvre
ca. 1900
albumen print
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

We have encountered the now-forgotten but once-famous marble relief known as the Borghese Dancers (above) in earlier investigations here when looking at the fate of Roman artifacts discovered, displayed and copied during the Renaissance. It came to France in the early 19th century among the Roman loot acquired by Napoleon.

Eugène Atget
Raspail family monument by Antoine Etex
Père Lachaise, Paris
ca. 1900
albumen print
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Eugène Atget
Observatory at château (1695) at Meudon, with storm effect
ca. 1900
albumen print
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Eugène Atget
File of statues at Versailles
ca. 1900
albumen print
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Eugène Atget
Pool at Versailles
ca. 1900
albumen print
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Eugène Atget
Statues of children at Versailles
ca. 1900
albumen print
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

"We tend to perceive photographs as fragments of the external world because the photographer is, for the present, limited to visible subjects. Yet the photographers accomplish an act steeped in contradiction, for while photographs are indeed no more than fragments, and no more than the visible, they call into question the meaning of all experience."

 Koji Taki, translated by Linda Hoaglund and published in Provoke (New York, 1999)

Eugène Atget
Ornamental vase at Versailles
ca. 1900
albumen print
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Eugène Atget
Files of small fountains at Versailles
ca. 1900
albumen print
Victoria & Albert Museum, London