Eugène Atget made more than 8,500 pictures of Paris and its environs, including this print of a wine and liquor storefront, in a career that spanned over thirty years, from the late nineteenth century until his death in 1927. He focused on the fabric of the city: facades of individual buildings both celebrated and ordinary, meandering streetscapes, details of stone- and ironwork, churches, shops, and the occasional monument. At the time, the city was undergoing massive renovations, meant to modernize its medieval layout and infrastructure. Atget’s photographs serve in part as records of the now mostly vanished, old Paris and attest to his consistently inventive and elegant methods of rendering the complexity of the three-dimensional world on a flat, rectangular plate.
Seeing Through Photographs online course, Coursera, 2016
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Eugène Atget
French, 1857–1927 2996 works onlineWorking in and around Paris for some 35 years, in a career that bridged the 19th and 20th centuries, Eugène Atget created an encyclopedic, idiosyncratic lived portrait of that city on the cusp of the modern era.
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