fine art / artists

Atget Photography

fine photographers  

In a working life less than a decade Diane Arbus effected a profound reconsideration of photography's intensions. Her work turned away from the central concerns of the preceding generation. She valued psychological above formal precision, private above social realities, the permanent and the prototypical above the ephemeral and the accidental, and courage above subtlety. These intuitions were pursued with acute intelligence and fierce dedication --- the latter almost perfectly concealed by humor, and a precisely calculated measure of self-deprecation.

With rare exceptions, Arbus made photographs only of people. The force of these portraits may be a measure of the degree to which the subject and the photographer agreed to risk trust and acceptance of each other. She was interested in them for what they were most specifically: not representatives of philosophical positions or life styles or physiological types, but unique mysteries.

In Japan, as elsewhere, the pictorial and conceptual traditions of painting were a mixed blessing to photography, especially after photographers in that country acquired the Japanese equivalent of Beaux Arts ambitions. The problem in Japan was perhaps even more knotty than it was in the West, for in some ways photography can more easily manage a superficial imitation of Hokusai than of Constable. Thus, Japanese photography before the Second World War was for the most part identified with broad and simple graphic patterns representing a landscape that was a closed aesthetic issue long before Commodore Perry's visit in 1853.

Ken Domon broke away from this romantic convention, and demonstrated that a clear depiction of the pertinent facts could be more challenging, and more surprising, than another mountain view in the mist. It is worth nothing that he developed his realistic and contemporary approach in photographing the sculpture and temples of old Japan. Students of traditional Japanese art will know this aspect of his work, which has remained the central and abiding preoccupation of his photographic life.

The life and the intention of Eugene Atget are fundamentally unknown to us. A few documented facts and a handful of recollections and legends provide a scant outline of the man:
He was born in Libourne, near Bordeaux, in 1857, and worked as a sailor during his youth; from the sea he turned to the stage, with no more than minor success; at forty he quit acting, and after a tentative experiment with painting Atget became a photographer, and began his true life's work.

Until his death thirty years later he worked quietly at his calling. To a casual observer he might have seemed a typical commercial photographer of the day. He was not progressive, but worked patiently with techniques that were obsolescent when he adopted them, and very nearly anachronistic by the time of his death. He was little given to experiment in the conventional sense, and less to theorizing. He founded no movement and attracted no circle. He did however make photographs which for purity and intensity of vision have not been bettered.