Atget's Seven Albums, in Practice

Between 1909 and 1915 Atget made a maquette for a book, L'Art dans le Vieux Paris, and six hardcover albums, Interieurs parisiens, La Voiture a Paris, Metiers, boutiques et etalages de Paris, Enseignes et vieilles boutiques de Paris, Zoniers and Fortifications de Paris. The first was never published; the rest were sold to the Cabinet des Estampes of the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. The seven albums represent a special period in Atget's career, a time when he tried to put his work into the public domain for inspection and debate. This thesis studies them in themselves and in the context of Atget's regular paractice. Atget's regular practice was a commercial one. He made and sold documents according to pre-established specifications and codes. The thesis develops a theory for the commercial picture; it locates commodity forms and use values in Atget's documents; it analyzes their different structures as part of a visual and economic dialectic of production and consumption. This requires an explanation of the differences between technical and aesthetic viewing and it requires a more complex definition of the document and the uses of photographic objectivity. After such an explanation it is possible to see that Atget developed pictures to double and triple function and that normally he produced documents ridden with functional ambiguity. Without compromising their usefulness, he was inclined to make the commercial form strange. This process occurred during Atget's normal business in documents, produced for the files of his clients. It is the common nineteenth century use for documentary photographs; at the same time, however, Atget worked to develop his work in line with the emerging twentieth century uses, worked, that is to say, to get his work published. He considered his profession to be that of an auteur-editeur, not a photographe. His efforts to publish were never very successful; the high point came with the seven albums. At the Bibliotheque Nationale he put his work in the same place it would have come if it had been published. At the Bibliotheque Nationale he also got a public. The album L'Art dans le Vieux Paris set the tone for the others though it differs substantially from them in most respects. It was made for his Vieux Paris trade and shows Atget both in and out of the Vieux Paris discourses, definitely not the gentleman antiquarian. The next two, Interieurs parisiens and La Voiture, take a contrary tack and show modern rooms and vehicles full of references and issues like style and speed but empty of any human life. . . . (Author's abstract exceeds stipulated maximum length. Discontinued here with permission of author.) UMI