Eugène Atget (1857–1927) - Rue Saint - Jacques

Eugène Atget (1857-1927), Rue Saint-Jacques, ca. 1889/1981.

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

Provenance: Private collection, Berlin.

Condition: Good. The images are part of the condition description.

With his atmospheric black-and-white photographs of the historic Parisian quarter Saint-Séverin in the Latin Quarter, the French photographer Eugène Atget documented the winding lanes, old façades and picturesque street scenes of Vieux Paris around the turn of the century. The photographs from the late 19th to early 20th century are among the significant witnesses 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 try to become an actor, with little success. He began photographing in 1888. From 1890 he sold his glass-plate negatives photographed with a large-format camera as working material to artists, designers, and architects. A large part of his extensive oeuvre of about 8,500 glass negatives had already been sold by Atget in 1920 to French institutions. After his death in 1927, the young photographer Berenice Abbott, who had come to know Atget through his friend Man Ray, acquired part of the estate and published in 1930 the first overview of Atget’s work, which brought him international recognition posthumously.