PARIS–NEW YORK: PHOTOGRAPHS BY EUGENE ATGET AND BERENICE ABBOTT
Atget roamed his city with a view camera, exposing cumbersome glass-plate negatives. Not only was his technology of the 19th century, his views tend to be small, intimate, and timeless. He was not interested in sweeping skylines, in the Eiffel Tower, in the hum of busy boulevards. Among the subjects in this exhibit are an open-air bookstall, a corset shop, a newsstand, a vegetable shop, a bar. Atget shows us one item at a time, and we see these places as a pedestrian might–straight ahead, at eye level.
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One print is of a beautiful bar. Bright daylight diffuses beyond the edges of a window and illuminates the gleaming wood, the bottles and glasses neatly ordered before a mirror that reflects more light into the room. It is a scene of architectural precision. I could look at it for a long time, drinking in the crisp detail, but could not imagine dirtying a glass there. Atget’s perfect view lacks all signs of the life–customers ordering drinks, a bartender wiping the counter–that give this place its real meaning.
When Abbott moved to New York in 1929, she brought some of the Frenchman’s sensibility with her. Abbott was mesmerized by the pace of change in New York, and began photographing street scenes when she wasn’t engaged in the portraiture that was her bread and butter. In 1935 she was awarded a Federal Arts Project grant that supported her city photography for the next four years. Changing New York, published in 1939, was the result of that project, and most of the photographs displayed here were first reproduced there.
One of Abbott’s most famous photographs is El, Second and Third Avenue Lines. The photograph is taken from street level; the girders and ties of the elevated railway line above are matched perfectly by the shadows with which the bright midday sunlight stripes the pavement. The shops and pedestrians on the far side of the intersection, mottled with light and shadow, are in sharp focus. Near the camera, two men stand next to one of the pillars supporting the el; they are blurred and almost entirely silhouetted. The railway may be solid, but those ghostly, transient figures surely are not. Abbott has combined her attention to form (the patterns of light and shadow) with the untold story of those two figures. The photograph isn’t a documentation of the railway, whose architecture is better illustrated by its shadow than by the little we can actually distinguish of its structure; instead it’s a celebration of light, a memory of a single identifiable and unrepeatable moment.
