Atget's Gardens [antikvár]

^zuwucctiOfiy To be able to look at the French garden through the eyes of Eugene Atget is one of the great gifts that artist has left us. This exhibition and book mark the first time that a selection of his photographs of the royal parks and gardens of France have appeared together. Indeed, it is surprising how little of the work of this master has been published. His prints lie in buckram boxes and cardboard folders in museums' stacks or on collectors' shelves, hang on dealers' walls or are pasted matter-of-factly into the topographical albums of government archives. To see them together at last is unforgettable. His images communicate beauty, emotion, and history in powerful harmony. Each element illuminates and reinforces the other as we follow the self-effacing, obsessed photographer on his rounds winter, summer, spring, and fall, through the gardens of Versailles, Sceaux, St.-Cloud, the Tuileries, and the Luxembourg. He will find an allée of trees, a statue, and return to photograph it again and again, in different seasons, different years, different light. As we look at the iconography of architecture, sculpture, and fountains recorded by the honesty of Atget's vision, the ancient mysteries of the places return to haunt us. We are taken by his poetry. His conquest of us, like that of his own visible world, is complete. Atget is celebrated for his straightforward use of the camera to document the urban scene of Paris at the turn of the century. His passionate persistence was echoed a half century later by Georges Duhamel at the Académie Française: "In the present disorder of the world, to conserve is to create." But Atget's search represented something far more profound than simply recording and preserving a disappearing world. As Susan Sontag has reminded us, "What moves people to take pictures is finding something beautiful." It was beauty that he was after, and in the gardens that is what he found. Atget was at ease with beauty wherever he found it, in the damp city streets, among scraps of old ironwork, or on the surface glass of a shop window. But one feels that it was in the parks and gardens, recording with his camera what William H. Fox Talbot called "the injuries of time," to the marble, stone, and old trees, that he made his most soaring discoveries of beauty. It is not just the fading romance of something about to disappear that he gives us, but rather a new statement now framed within his photograph that transcends the evocative beauty of the gardens themselves. In organizing the material, we were at first overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of Atget's garden photographs. Passages of his earliest and latest work are preoccupied with the subject. By limiting the scope of exhibition and book to those former royal domains of Paris and the île de France that seem to have afforded the photographer the greatest fascination, especially Versailles and Sceaux, we have managed to hold our selection to seventy-seven prints. In assembling the documents, an unforeseen pattern of visual expression seemed to emerge.