Eugène Atget, Voir Paris, 2020

The most famous photographer of old Paris, Eugène Atget (1857-1927) tirelessly traveled the capital with his bellows chamber loaded with glass plates from 1897, and this for thirty years, capturing the topography of a city that exchanges. The result of two years of research, carried out jointly by Anne de Mondenard and Agnès Sire, brings together a selection of 146 photographs from the 9,164 prints that make up the Atget collection of the Carnavalet Museum. Conceived as a dreamlike and aesthetic promenade, Voir Paris takes us on a journey through time through the stalls, courtyards of buildings, plush interiors, alleys, cafes, ragpickers in the area, urban gardens, quays of the Seine… Favoring the lights of the early morning, his absolute mastery of framing, his attention to the lines of the buildings, to unexpected details, to abandoned things create a singular universe. With Atget, photography is reduced to itself, it has no prior. By his gaze, by his vision which mixes the imaginary and the real, Eugène Atget invented modern photography. The photographs, printed in four colors, retain their original edges in the book. They thus bear witness to the materiality and tone of the original prints, which is unprecedented in the publication of Atget’s work.