92
observant waiter, or a sleeping cat, all of which although
inessential for his purposes augment the sense of the
specifi c texture of ordinary Parisian life. Sideshow at-
tractions at annual neighborhood street fairs were part
of a long, but declining tradition, and were of as much
interest to him as old structures currently housing mod-
ern enterprises like automobile repair shops. Junkyards
and squatters’ shacks on the outskirts of the city were
as appropriate subjects as garden prospects lined with
eighteenth-century statues.
The photographs themselves were invariably contact
prints, made from seven by nine inch glass negatives,
which necessitated a satchel to carry them, and a tripod-
mounted camera in which to place them for exposure.
The negatives, of which there were eventually about
8500, were usually rendered as albumen prints, until
albumen paper became unavailable about 1920 and he
was forced to utilize gelatin silver paper. Occasionally,
by rephotography, he enlarged portions of his negatives
to produce pictures that showed at closer range the in-
tricacies of decorative details in plaster, wood, or iron.
He processed his negatives and produced his prints in
his modest apartment without the help of assistants,
except perhaps the actress, (aptly-named) Valentine
Compagnon, whom he met in 1886, and who lived with
him until her death shortly before his own in 1923. On
the backs of his prints Atget invariably identifi ed the
places shown by inscribing street addresses or structure
or site names and the number of the arrondissement.
His knowledge of and interest in the history of Paris is
confi rmed by occasional supplemental inscriptions that
provide information about a building’s former use or the
time of its construction.
Atget’s importance lies not only in the trove of haunt-
ing but apparently straight-forward and objective images
of nearly deserted streets of Paris that he produced, but
also in the infl uence of the humble nature of his subject
matter and his apparent objectivity on twentieth-century
photographers like Walker Evans and Lee Friedlander.
He provides an essential bridge between photography
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. When toward
the end of his life he was taken up by Man Ray and the
Surrealists, who found inadvertent juxtapositions in his
work that were unsettling and intriguing, Atget insisted
that he did not have artistic aspirations, that the pictures
were, as his sign said, simply meant as documents that
could be useful to artists.
Gordon Baldwin
See Also: Marville, Charles; Albumen Print; Dry
Plate Negatives; and Gelatin Silver Print.
Further Reading
Baldwin, Gordon et al. Eugène Atget. Los Angeles: The J. Paul
Getty Museum, 2000.
Beaumont-Maillet, Laure. Atget Paris. Paris: Hazan, 1992.
Nesbit, Molly: Atget’s Seven Albums. New Haven, London: Yale
University Press, 1992.
——. Eugène Atget. Intérieurs parisiens. Un album du musée
Carnavalet. [Atget’s Interiors. An Album at the Musée Car-
navalet] Paris, 1992.
Szarkowski, John and Hambourg, Maria Morris: The Work of At-
get. Old France. New York, Boston: The Museum of Modern
Art, 1981 (vol.1).
——. The Work of Atget. The Art of Old Paris. New York, Boston:
The Museum of Modern Art, 1982 (vol. 2).
——. The Work of Atget. The Ancien Regime. New York, Boston:
The Museum of Modern Art, 1983 (vol. 3).
——. The Work of Atget. Modern Times. New York, Boston: The
Museum of Modern Art, 1985 (vol. 4).ATHENAEUM
The Athenaeum was the leading journal for literary and
artistic reviews during the mid nineteenth century. It was
launched by James Silk Buckingham as a 9d publication
on 2 January 1828. After struggling for the fi rst two
years of its existence against its main competitors, the
Literary Gazette and the London Weekly Review, the Ath-
enaeum was made into a fi nancial and cultural success
when Charles Wentworth Dilke took over the editorship
in June 1830. Dilke, whose editorship lasted until 1846,
declared war on the puffery that dominated literary
reviewing. He also reduced the price of the Athenaeum
from 8d to 4d, dramatically increasing its circulation to
average sales of around 18,000 copies a week.
One of the most distinctive features of the Athenae-
um was the extensive attention it devoted to popular
science. It chronicled in detail the meetings of the most
important societies such as the Royal Society, Royal
Geographical Society, Royal Asiatic Society, Society of
Antiquaries, and British Association for the Advance-
ment for Science. Prior to the publication of the British
Journal of Photography and the Photographic News,
the Athenaeum is thereby one of the most important
indexes to the development of photography. In Jan
1839, its Parisian correspondent described a personal
interview with Louis Daguerre that included a demon-
stration of his new process. During the 1840s and early
1850s, papers on photography read at the Royal Society
and the Academie des Sciences were enthusiastically
published by the Athenaeum. These often included
precise accounts of the latest chemical processes aimed
at improving the quality of photographs. Henry Fox Tal-
bot, Sir John Herschel, and John Jabez Edwin Mayall
were amongst those notable fi gures who had letters or
papers printed.
Debates on photography were often played out in
the pages of the Athenaeum. In May and June 1847,
for example, Antoine Claudet and Robert Hunt were
involved in a spat over the value of colouring photo-
graphs. Similarly, its reviews of the annual exhibition