Eugène Atget (1857–1927) - Rue Boutebrie

Eugène Atget (1857-1927), Rue Boutebrie, c. 1889/1981. (No minimum price).

Silver gelatin on photographic paper, 24 x 17.6 cm, mounted on a backing board (34 x 28 cm) which is numbered, dated, marked and titled.

Provenance: Private collection, Berlin.

Condition: Good. Images are part of the condition description.

With his atmospheric black-and-white photographs of the historic Paris district Saint-Séverin in the Latin Quarter, the French photographer Eugène Atget documented the winding lanes, old facades, and picturesque street scenes of Vieux Paris around the turn of the century. The photographs, created between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, are among the significant testimonies of early documentary photography and preserve the architectural and cultural heritage of old Paris.

Biography
Eugène Atget was born in 1957 in Libourne, France. In 1878 he went to Paris to become an actor, with little success. He began taking photographs in 1888. From 1890 he sold his glass-plate negatives, captured with a large-format camera, as working material to artists, designers, and architects. A large part of his extensive oeuvre of around 8,500 glass negatives was sold by Atget in 1920 to French institutions. After his death in 1927, the young photographer Berenice Abbott, who had come to know and appreciate Atget through his friend Man Ray, acquired part of the estate and published the first overview of Atget’s work in 1930, which earned him posthumous international recognition.