Eugène Atget (1857–1927) - Rue Galande

Eugène Atget (1857-1927), Rue Galande, circa 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, labeled and titled.

Provenance: Private collection, Berlin.

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

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 narrow alleys, 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, constitute significant testimonies of early documentary photography and preserve the architectural and cultural heritage of old Paris.

Biography
Eugène Atget was born in 1857 in Libourne, France. In 1878 he went to Paris in an attempt to become an actor, without much success. He began photographing in 1888. From 1890 he sold his photographs, enlarged from glass negatives on 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 admire Atget through his friend Man Ray, acquired part of the estate and published the first overview of Atget’s work in 1930, which brought him international recognition posthumously.