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93-450: Eugène Atget ( French: [adʒɛ] ; 12 February 1857 – 4 August 1927) was a French flâneur and a pioneer of documentary photography , noted for his determination to document all of the architecture and street scenes of Paris before their disappearance to modernization. Most of his photographs were first published by Berenice Abbott after his death. Though he sold his work to artists and craftspeople, and became an inspiration for

186-450: A Dada or Surrealist quality about them. Abigail Solomon Godeau referred to part of Atget's photos as surrealist . One of the earliest analytical texts about Atget is Walter Benjamin 's essay A Brief History of Photography (1931). Benjamin views Atget as a forerunner of surrealist photography, effectively making him a member of the European avant-garde . In his understanding, Atget is

279-457: A "complete philosophical way of living and thinking", and a process of navigating erudition as described by Nassim Nicholas Taleb 's essay "Why I Do All This Walking, or How Systems Become Fragile". Taleb further set this term with a positive connotation referring to anyone pursuing open, flexible plans, in opposition to the negative "touristification", which he defines as the pursuit of an overly orderly plan. Louis Menand , in seeking to describe

372-551: A book with prints she made from Atget's negatives: The World of Atget (1964). Berenice Abbott and Eugene Atget was published in 2002. As the city and architecture are two main themes in Atget's photographs, his work has been commented on and reviewed together with the work of Berenice Abbott and Amanda Bouchenoire , in the book Architecture and Cities. Three Photographic Gazes , where author Jerome Saltz analyzes historicist perspectives and considers their aesthetic implications: "(...)

465-512: A catalog that was part of the artistic and semantic system of his photographs. This circumstance allows us to perceive Atget’s works as an example of a specific artistic program and consider them as an example of non-logical forms in photography . One of the central problems associated with Atget's work is determining the balance between fiction and documentary. Atget created his photographs as utilitarian materials (documents for artists or archival images of Parisian monuments) - their artistic status

558-628: A crowd gathered at the Colonne de Juillet to peer through various devices, or through their bare fingers, at the Solar eclipse of 17 April 1912 . Atget however did not regard himself as a Surrealist. When Ray asked Atget if he could use his photo, Atget said: "Don't put my name on it. These are simply documents I make." Man Ray proposed that Atget's pictures of staircases, doorways, ragpickers, and especially those with window reflections (when foreground and background mix and mannequins looks like ready to step out), had

651-410: A flaneur, a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds." Vignetting Vignetting is often an unintended and undesired effect caused by camera settings or lens limitations. However, it is sometimes deliberately introduced for creative effect, such as to draw attention to the center of the frame. A photographer may deliberately choose a lens that

744-633: A four-volume series of books based on its four successive exhibitions of Atget's life and work, between 1981 and 1985. In 2001, the Philadelphia Museum of Art acquired the Julien Levy Collection of Photographs, the centerpiece of which includes 361 photographs by Atget. Many of these photographs were printed by Atget himself and purchased by Levy directly from the photographer. Others arrived in Levy's possession when he and Berenice Abbott entered

837-512: A general purpose gelatin-silver emulsion, fairly slow, that necessitated quite long exposures, resulting in the blurring of moving subjects seen in some of his pictures. Interest in Atget's work has prompted the recent scientific analysis of Atget's negatives and prints in Parisian collections and in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In Intérieurs Parisiens , a series of photographs he took for

930-450: A landmark exhibition at MOMA This idea has been supported by researchers such as Rosalind Krauss and other experts. By 1891 Atget advertised his business with a shingle at his door, remarked later by Berenice Abbott, that announced “Documents pour Artistes”. Initially his subjects were flowers, animals, landscapes, and monuments; sharp and meticulous studies centred simply in the frame and intended for artists' use. Atget then embarked on

1023-488: A letter to the Minister of Fine Arts; For more than 20 years I have been working alone and of my own initiative in all the old streets of Old Paris to make a collection of 18 × 24cm photographic negatives: artistic documents of beautiful urban architecture from the 16th to the 19th centuries…today this enormous artistic and documentary collection is finished; I can say that I possess all of Old Paris The U.S. Library of Congress

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1116-400: A memorable portrait of the flâneur as the artist-poet of the modern metropolis: The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur , for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in

1209-637: A partnership to preserve Atget's studio in 1930. Eighty-three prints in the Levy Collection were made by Abbott posthumously as exhibition prints that she produced directly from Atget's glass negatives. Additionally, the Levy Collection included three of Atget's photographic albums, crafted by the photographer himself. The most complete is an album of domestic interiors titled Intérieurs Parisiens Début du XXe Siècle, Artistiques, Pittoresques & Bourgeois . The other two albums are fragmentary. Album No. 1, Jardin des Tuileries has only four pages still intact, and

1302-446: A photographer Atget still called himself an actor, giving lectures and readings. During World War I Atget temporarily stored his archives in his basement for safekeeping and almost completely gave up photography. Valentine's son Léon was killed at the front. In 1920–21, he sold thousands of his negatives to institutions. Financially independent, he took up photographing the parks of Versailles , Saint-Cloud and Sceaux and produced

1395-496: A representative of a new photographic vision, and not a master of idyllic photographs of 19th-century Paris. He names Atget as the discoverer of the fragment that will become the central motif of the New Vision photograph. Benjamin draws attention to the fact that Atget liberates photography from the aura that was characteristic of both early 19th-century photography and classical works of art in particular. Thus, Walter Benjamin denotes

1488-465: A restriction of the Field of View (FOV) – parts of the image are then completely black. This type of vignetting is caused by the physical dimensions of a multiple element lens. Rear elements of the lens are shaded by elements in front of them, which reduces the effective lens opening for off-axis incident light. The result is a gradual decrease in light intensity towards the image periphery. Optical vignetting

1581-452: A series of photographs of prostitutes. Berenice Abbott , while working with Man Ray , visited Atget in 1925, bought some of his photographs, and tried to interest other artists in his work. She continued to promote Atget through various articles, exhibitions and books, and sold her Atget collection to the Museum of Modern Art in 1968. In 1926, Atget's partner Valentine died, and before he saw

1674-454: A series of picturesque views of Paris which include documentation of the small trades in his series Petits Métiers . He made views of gardens in the areas surrounding Paris, in the summer of 1901, photographing the gardens at Versailles, a challenging subject of large scale and with combinations of natural and architectural and sculptural elements which he would revisit until 1927, learning to make balanced compositions and perspectives. Early in

1767-484: A short story called " Der Spaziergang " ("The Walk"), a veritable outcome of the flâneur literature. Walter Benjamin adopted the concept of the urban observer both as an analytical tool and as a lifestyle. From his Marxist standpoint, Benjamin describes the flâneur as a product of modern life and the Industrial Revolution without precedent, a parallel to the advent of the tourist . His flâneur

1860-420: A smaller series on costumes and religious arts, returning to subjects after they had been put aside for many years. The principle of the archive is considered as the basis of the artistic program by many researchers of Atget's work. The research of Maria Morris Hamburg and John Szarkowski corrected the understanding of Atget's program. It implied that the photographer was not creating a pictorial monolith, but

1953-455: A specific themes that might be of interest to his clients, and separate from series or chronology. One of the main issues related to Atget’s work is the nature and specificity of his legacy. Some researchers consider him, first of all, the author of romantic Parisian views. Other researchers believe that the size of the archive is important in assessing his work—the entire corpus of 10 thousand photographs, and not just individual photographs. It

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2046-432: Is a French term popularized in the 19th century for a type of urban male "stroller", "lounger", "saunterer", or "loafer". The word has some nuanced additional meanings (including as a loanword into various languages, including English). Traditionally depicted as male, a flâneur is an ambivalent figure of urban affluence and modernity , representing the ability to wander detached from society, for an entertainment from

2139-407: Is always in full possession of his individuality, whereas the individuality of the badaud disappears. It is absorbed by the outside world ... which intoxicates him to the point where he forgets himself. Under the influence of the spectacle which presents itself to him, the badaud becomes an impersonal creature; he is no longer a human being, he is part of the public, of the crowd." In

2232-495: Is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world "picturesque." The flâneur concept is not limited to someone committing the physical act of a peripatetic stroll in the Baudelairian sense, but can also include

2325-400: Is an uninvolved but highly perceptive bourgeois dilettante. Benjamin became his own prime example, making social and aesthetic observations during long walks through Paris. Even the title of his unfinished Arcades Project comes from his affection for covered shopping streets. The crowd was the veil from behind which the familiar city as phantasmagoria beckoned to the flâneur . In it,

2418-409: Is believed that the meaning of his activity is not only in the creation of individual images, but also in the formation of a sequential series of images. In this case, it is important to have an exceptional number of photographs (about 10 thousand), as well as the use of a systematic archival principle . The idea of a work as a community was used by Maria Morris Hamburg and John Szarkowski when preparing

2511-421: Is due to his having repositioned the lens relative to the plate on the camera—exploiting one of the features of bellows view cameras as a way to correct perspective and control perspective and keep vertical forms straight. The negatives show four small clear rebates (printing black) where clips held the glass in the plate-holder during exposure. The glass plates were 180×240mm Bande Bleue (Blue Ribbon) brand with

2604-404: Is evidenced in part by the dandy culture. Highly self-aware, and to a certain degree flamboyant and theatrical, dandies of the mid-nineteenth century created scenes through self-consciously outrageous acts like walking turtles on leashes down the streets of Paris. Such acts exemplify a flâneur 's active participation in and fascination with street life while displaying a critical attitude towards

2697-522: Is known to produce vignetting to obtain the effect, or it may be introduced with the use of special filters or post-processing procedures. When using zoom lenses , vignetting may occur all along the zoom range, depending on the aperture and the focal length . However, it may not always be visible, except at the widest end (the shortest focal length). In these cases, vignetting may cause an exposure value (EV) difference of up to 3EV. There are several causes of vignetting. Sidney F. Ray distinguishes

2790-452: Is sensitive to the lens aperture and can often be cured by a reduction in aperture of 2–3 stops. (An increase in the F-number .) Unlike the previous types, natural vignetting (also known as natural illumination falloff) is not due to the blocking of light rays. The falloff is approximated by the cos or "cosine fourth" law of illumination fall off. Here, the light fall off is proportional to

2883-438: Is the passante , dating to the works of Marcel Proust , though a 21st-century academic coinage is flâneuse , and some English-language writers simply apply the masculine flâneur also to women. The term has acquired an additional architecture and urban planning sense, referring to passers-by who experience incidental or intentional psychological effects from the design of a structure. Flâneur derives from

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2976-475: Is used to create a low fidelity appearance in the picture. To give a photo a 'retro' look - that it was made with an old camera or lens - one could add an obvious 'vignette' using 'lens correction' or burning in margins by any of several techniques. There is a much more general use. Viewers' eyes are attracted to brightness so if the areas to the corners or edges are brighter than the desired center of interest, eyes may wander towards that brightness. To direct

3069-404: The flâneur as a "gentleman stroller of city streets", he saw him as having a key role in understanding, participating in, and portraying the city. A flâneur thus played a double role in city life and in theory, that is, while remaining a detached observer. This stance, simultaneously part of and apart from , combines sociological, anthropological, literary, and historical notions of

3162-448: The flâneur in ambivalent terms, equal parts curiosity and laziness, and presented a taxonomy of flânerie : flâneurs of the boulevards, of parks, of the arcades, of cafés; mindless flâneurs and intelligent ones. By then, the term had already developed a rich set of associations. Sainte-Beuve wrote that to flâne "is the very opposite of doing nothing". Honoré de Balzac described flânerie as "the gastronomy of

3255-417: The passante to become an active participant in the 19th century metropolis, as women's social roles expanded away from the domestic and the private, into the public and urban spheres. Twenty-first-century literary criticism and gender studies scholarship has proposed flâneuse for the female equivalent of the flâneur , with some additional feminist re-analysis. This proposal derives from

3348-605: The Bibliotèque Historique de la Ville de Paris in 1906 and 1911 and the sale of various albums of photographs to the Bibliotèque Nationale Atget's photographs attracted the attention of, and were purchased by, artists such as Henri Matisse , Marcel Duchamp and Picasso in the 1920s, as well as Maurice Utrillo , Edgar Degas and André Derain , some of whose views are seen from identical vantage-points at which Atget took pictures, and were likely made with

3441-567: The Old Norse verb flana , "to wander with no purpose". The terms of flânerie date to the 16th or 17th century, denoting strolling, idling, often with the connotation of wasting time. But it was in the 19th century that a rich set of meanings and definitions surrounding the flâneur took shape. The flâneur was defined in 1872 in a long article in Pierre Larousse 's Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle . It described

3534-467: The grammatically masculine flâneur is also applied to women (including modern ones) in essentially the same senses as for the original male referents, at least in English-language borrowings of the term. These feminist scholars have argued that the word 'flâneuse' implies women's distinctive modalities of conceiving, interacting, occupying, and experiencing space. While Baudelaire characterized

3627-598: The merchant navy . Atget moved to Paris in 1878. He failed the entrance exam for acting class but was admitted when he had a second try. Because he was drafted for military service he could attend class only part-time, and he was expelled from drama school. Still living in Paris, he became an actor with a travelling group, performing in the Paris suburbs and the provinces. He met actress Valentine Delafosse Compagnon, who became his companion until her death. He gave up acting because of an infection of his vocal cords in 1887, moved to

3720-508: The postmodern spectatorial gaze. And it has served as a source of inspiration to writers and artists. The historical feminine rough equivalent of the flâneur , the passante (French for 'walker', 'passer-by'), appears prominently in the work of Marcel Proust . He portrayed several of his female characters as elusive, passing figures, who tended to ignore his obsessive (and at times possessive) view of them. Increasing freedoms and social innovations such as industrialization later allowed

3813-534: The surrealists , he did not live to see the wide acclaim his work would eventually receive. Jean-Eugène-Auguste Atget was born 12 February 1857 in Libourne . His father, carriage builder Jean-Eugène Atget, died in 1862, and his mother, Clara-Adeline Atget née Hourlier died shortly after; he was an orphan at age seven. He was brought up by his maternal grandparents in Bordeaux and after finishing secondary education joined

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3906-547: The 1900s, Atget began to document “Old Paris,” reading extensively in order to sympathetically focus on Paris architecture and environments dating prior to the French Revolution, concern over the preservation of which ensured him commercial success. He framed the winding streets to show the historic buildings in context, rather than making frontal architectural elevations. Atget's specialisation in imagery of Old Paris expanded his clientele. Amongst his scant surviving documents

3999-491: The Bibliotéque Nationale, he included a view of his own simple darkroom with trays for processing negatives and prints, a safelight, and printing frames. After taking a photograph, Atget would develop, wash, and fix his negative, then assign the negative to one of his filing categories with the next consecutive number that he would write the negative number in graphite on the verso of the negative and also scratch it into

4092-641: The Crowd ", the flâneur entered the literary scene. Charles Baudelaire discusses "The Man of the Crowd" in " The Painter of Modern Life "; it would go on to become a key example in Walter Benjamin 's essay "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire", which theorizes the role of the crowd in modernity. In the 1860s, in the midst of the rebuilding of Paris under Napoleon III and the Baron Haussmann , Charles Baudelaire presented

4185-674: The Directorate of Fine Arts and others. During the Depression in the 1930s Abbott sold half of her collection to Julian Levy , who owned a gallery in New York. Since he had difficulty selling the prints, he allowed Abbott to keep them in her possession. In the late 1960s Abbott and Levy sold the collection of Atgets to The Museum of Modern Art. As MoMA bought it, the collection contained 1415 glass negatives and nearly 8,000 vintage prints from over 4,000 distinct negatives. The publication of his work in

4278-611: The French government; the others he sold to the American photographer Berenice Abbott, Atget created a comprehensive photographic record of the look and feel of nineteenth-century Paris just as it was being dramatically transformed by modernization, and its buildings were being systematically demolished. When Berenice Abbott reportedly asked him if the French appreciated his art, he responded ironically, "No, only young foreigners." While Ray and Abbott claimed to have 'discovered' him around 1925, he

4371-483: The United States after his death and the promotion of his work to English-speaking audiences was due to Berenice Abbott. She exhibited, printed and wrote about his work, and assembled a substantial archive of writings about his portfolio by herself and others. Abbott published Atget, Photographe de Paris in 1930, the first overview of his photographic oeuvre and the beginning of his international fame. She also published

4464-573: The argument that women conceived and experienced public space differently from men in modern cities. Janet Wolff , in The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity (1985), argues that the female figure of the flâneuse is absent in the literature of modernity , because public space had been gendered in modernity, leading, in turn, women's exclusion from public spaces to domestic spaces and suburbs. Elizabeth Wilson , on

4557-414: The artist immerse himself in the metropolis and become, in Baudelaire's phrase, "a botanist of the sidewalk". David Harvey asserts that "Baudelaire would be torn the rest of his life between the stances of flâneur and dandy , a disengaged and cynical voyeur on the one hand, and man of the people who enters into the life of his subjects with passion on the other". The observer–participant dialectic

4650-465: The assistance of his photographs bought from the photographer for a few cents. By the end of his career, Atget had worked methodically and concurrently on thirteen separate series of photographs including 'Landscape Documents', 'Picturesque Paris', 'Art in Old Paris', 'Environs', 'Topography of Old Paris', 'Tuileries', 'Vielle France', 'Interiors', 'Saint Cloud', 'Versailles', 'Parisian Parks', 'Sceaux' and

4743-419: The city was now landscape, now a room. And both of these went into the construction of the department store, which made use of flânerie itself in order to sell goods. The department store was the flâneur's final coup. As flâneurs , the intelligentsia came into the market place. As they thought, to observe it – but in reality it was already to find a buyer. In this intermediary stage ... they took

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4836-428: The complexities of the modern city create new social bonds and new attitudes towards others. The modern city was transforming humans, giving them a new relationship to time and space, inculcating in them a " blasé attitude", and altering fundamental notions of freedom and being: The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in

4929-431: The decades since Benjamin, the flâneur has been the subject of a remarkable number of appropriations and interpretations. The figure of the flâneur has been used—among other things – to explain modern, urban experience, to explain urban spectatorship, to explain the class tensions and gender divisions of the nineteenth-century city, to describe modern alienation, to explain the sources of mass culture , to explain

5022-580: The direction of research into the frame and technical arts, which he will continue in his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction . He will be remembered as an urbanist historian, a genuine romanticist, a lover of Paris, a Balzac of the camera, from whose work we can weave a large tapestry of French civilization. After Atget's death his friend, the actor André Calmettes , sorted his work into two categories; 2,000 records of historic Paris, and photographs of all other subjects. The former, he gave to

5115-420: The effect of changing the entrance pupil shape as a function of angle (resulting in the path of light being partially blocked). Darkening can be gradual or abrupt – the smaller the aperture, the more abrupt the vignetting as a function of angle. When some points on an image receives no light at all due to mechanical vignetting (the paths of light to these image points is completely blocked), then this results in

5208-432: The emulsion. He contact-printed his negatives onto pre-sensitized, commercially available printing-out papers ; albumen paper, gelatin-silver printing-out paper, or two types of matte albumen paper that he used mainly after WW1. The negative was clamped into a printing frame under glass and against a sheet of albumen photographic printing out paper, which was left out in the sun to expose. The frame permitted inspection of

5301-652: The eye". Anaïs Bazin wrote that "the only, the true sovereign of Paris is the flâneur ". Victor Fournel, in Ce qu'on voit dans les rues de Paris ( What One Sees in the Streets of Paris , 1867), devoted a chapter to "the art of flânerie ". For Fournel, there was nothing lazy in flânerie . It was, rather, a way of understanding the rich variety of the city landscape; it was like "a mobile and passionate photograph" (" un daguerréotype mobile et passioné ") of urban experience. With Edgar Allan Poe 's short story " The Man of

5394-494: The face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life. The fight with nature which primitive man has to wage for his bodily existence attains in this modern form its latest transformation. The eighteenth century called upon man to free himself of all the historical bonds in the state and in religion, in morals and in economics. Man's nature, originally good and common to all, should develop unhampered. In addition to more liberty,

5487-495: The fair sex who builds up his family from all the beautiful women that he has ever found, or that are or are not—to be found; or the lover of pictures who lives in a magical society of dreams painted on canvas. Thus, the lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy. Or we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and reproducing

5580-449: The following types: A fourth cause is unique to digital imaging: A fifth cause is unique to analog imaging: Mechanical vignetting occurs when light beams emanating from object points located off-axis (laterally or vertically off from the optical axis of an optical system under consideration) are partially blocked by external objects of the optical system such as thick or stacked filters, secondary lenses, and improper lens hoods. This has

5673-411: The form of the bohème . To the uncertainty of their economic position corresponded the uncertainty of their political function. In the context of modern-day architecture and urban planning, designing for flâneurs is one way to approach the psychological aspects of the built environment. The flâneur 's tendency toward detached but aesthetically attuned observation has brought the term into

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5766-516: The fourth power of the cosine of the angle at which the light impinges on the film or sensor array . Wide angle rangefinder designs and the lens designs used in compact cameras are particularly prone to natural vignetting. Telephoto lenses, retrofocus wide angle lenses used on SLR cameras, and telecentric designs in general are less troubled by natural vignetting. A gradual grey filter or postprocessing techniques may be used to compensate for natural vignetting, as it cannot be cured by stopping down

5859-447: The full-face and profile portraits that Abbott took of him in 1927, showing him “slightly stooped…tired, sad, remote, appealing”, Atget died on 4 August in 1927, in Paris. At the moment, not many reliable facts from Atget’s life are known. It is believed that Atget was poor, while at the same time, there is an assumption that the photographer’s cramped financial circumstances are a myth established by later researchers in attempts to create

5952-560: The image of a romantic artist. In his research, John Szarkowski cited a fragment of Atget’s correspondence with Paul Leon, a professor at the Collège de France , an employee of the Commission on Historical Monuments and one of the top officials of the French Ministry of Culture (French), from which it follows that they sold 2,600 negatives for 10,000 francs. This is one of the largest, but not

6045-477: The image sensor can also reduce the effect of pixel vignetting. For artistic effect, vignetting is sometimes applied to an otherwise un-vignetted photograph and can be achieved by burning the outer edges of the photograph (with film stock) or using digital imaging techniques, such as masking darkened edges. The Lens Correction filter in Photoshop can also achieve the same effect. In digital imaging, this technique

6138-449: The leisurely discrimination of a gourmet , savoring the multiple flavors of his city." The concept of the flâneur has also become meaningful in the psychogeography of architecture and urban planning , describing people who are indirectly and (usually) unintentionally affected by a particular design they experience only in passing. In 1917, the Swiss writer Robert Walser published

6231-617: The lens. Some modern lenses are specifically designed so that the light strikes the image perpendicular or nearly so, eliminating or greatly reducing vignetting. Pixel vignetting only affects digital cameras and is caused by angle-dependence of the digital sensors . Light incident on the sensor at normal incident produces a stronger signal than light hitting it at an oblique angle. Most digital cameras use built-in image processing to compensate for optical vignetting and pixel vignetting when converting raw sensor data to standard image formats such as JPEG or TIFF . The use of offset microlenses over

6324-418: The literature of photography, particularly street photography . The street photographer is seen as one modern extension of the urban observer described by nineteenth century journalist Victor Fournel before the advent of the hand-held camera: This man is a roving and impassioned daguerreotype that preserves the least traces, and on which are reproduced, with their changing reflections, the course of things,

6417-425: The many who donated their own collections of his photographs to institutions. The address book lists also contacts at publications, such as L’Illustration , Revue Hebdomadaire , Les Annales politiques et litteraires , and l’Art et des artistes . Institutional collectors of Old Paris documents, including archives, schools, and museums were also a keen clientele and brought him commercial success, with commissions from

6510-452: The metropolis set up between the individual and the super-individual contents of life. Writing in 1962, Cornelia Otis Skinner suggested that there was no English equivalent of the term: "there is no Anglo-Saxon counterpart of that essentially Gallic individual, the deliberately aimless pedestrian, unencumbered by any obligation or sense of urgency, who, being French and therefore frugal, wastes nothing, including his time which he spends with

6603-403: The midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world—impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito. The lover of life makes the whole world his family, just like the lover of

6696-427: The movement of the city, the multiple physiognomy of the public spirit, the confessions, antipathies, and admirations of the crowd. An application of flâneur to street photography comes from Susan Sontag in her 1977 collection of essays, On Photography . She describes how, since the development of hand-held cameras in the early 20th century, the camera has become the tool of the flâneur : The photographer

6789-431: The multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life. But Baudelaire's association of the flâneur with artists and the world of art has been questioned. Drawing on Fournel, and on his analysis of the poetry of Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin described the flâneur as the essential figure of the modern urban spectator, an amateur detective and investigator of the city. More than this, his flâneur

6882-453: The nineteenth century demanded the functional specialization of man and his work; this specialization makes one individual incomparable to another, and each of them indispensable to the highest possible extent. This specialization makes each man more directly dependent upon the supplementary activities of all others. Nietzsche sees the full development of the individual conditioned by the most ruthless struggle of individuals; socialism believes in

6975-419: The observation of the urban life. Flânerie is the act of strolling, with all of its accompanying associations. A near-synonym of the noun is boulevardier . The flâneur was first a literary type from 19th-century France , essential to any picture of the streets of Paris . The word carried a set of rich associations: the man of leisure , the idler, the urban explorer, the connoisseur of

7068-534: The only lifetime sales of Atget. Atget took up photography in the late 1880s, around the time that photography was experiencing unprecedented expansion in both commercial and amateur fields. Atget photographed Paris with a large-format wooden bellows camera with a rapid rectilinear lens , an instrument that was fairly current when he took it up, but which he continued to use even when hand-held and more efficient large-format cameras became available. The optical vignetting often seen at some corners of his photographs

7161-719: The other hand, in The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women (1991), points out women's diverse experiences in public space in the modern metropolises such as London , Paris , Vienna , Berlin , discussing how the modern city was conceived as a place of freedom, autonomy, and pleasure, and how women experienced these spaces. Linda McDowell , in Gender, Identity and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies (1999), expands this understanding to explain how public space

7254-582: The other lacks a cover and title but contains photographs from numerous Parisian parks. In total, the Philadelphia Museum of Art holds approximately 489 objects attributed to Atget. Atget, a Retrospective was presented at the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris in 2007. The Atget crater on the planet Mercury is named after him, as is Rue Eugène-Atget in the 13th arrondissement of Paris . Although no statement by Atget about his technique or aesthetic approach survives, he did sum up his life's work in

7347-544: The poet T. S. Eliot 's relationship to English literary society and his role in the formation of modernism, describes Eliot as a flâneur . Moreover, in one of Eliot's well-known poems, "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock", the protagonist takes the reader for a journey through his city in the manner of a flâneur . Using the term more critically, in " De Profundis ", Oscar Wilde wrote from prison about his life regrets, stating: "I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being

7440-554: The possibility of its integrity and semantic completeness. Man Ray , who lived on the same street as Atget in Paris, the rue Campagne-Première in Montparnasse purchased and collected almost fifty of Atget's photographs into an album embossed with the name 'Atget', "coll. Man Ray" and a date, 1926. He published several of Atget's photographs in his La Révolution surréaliste ; most famously in issue number 7, of 15 June 1926, his Pendant l’éclipse made fourteen years earlier and showing

7533-444: The print until a satisfactory exposure was achieved, then Atget washed, fixed and toned his print with gold toner, as was the standard practice when he took up photography. Atget did not use an enlarger, and all of his prints are the same size as their negatives. Prints would be numbered and labelled on their backs in pencil then inserted by the corners into four slits cut in each page of albums. Additional albums were assembled based on

7626-713: The provinces and took up painting without success. When he was thirty he made his first photographs, of Amiens and Beauvais , which date from 1888. In 1890, Atget moved back to Paris and became a professional photographer, supplying documents for artists: studies for painters, architects, and stage designers. Starting in 1898, institutions such as the Musée Carnavalet and the Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris bought his photographs. The latter commissioned him ca. 1906 to systematically photograph old buildings in Paris. In 1899 he moved to Montparnasse . While being

7719-515: The relationship between the individual and the greater populace. In the period after the French Revolution of 1848 , during which the Empire was reestablished with clearly bourgeois pretensions of "order" and "morals", Baudelaire began asserting that traditional art was inadequate for the new dynamic complications of modern life. Social and economic changes brought by industrialization demanded that

7812-447: The street. Drawing on the work of Charles Baudelaire who described the flâneur in his poetry and 1863 essay " The Painter of Modern Life ", Walter Benjamin promoted 20th-century scholarly interest in the flâneur as an emblematic archetype of urban, modern (even modernist ) experience. Following Benjamin, the flâneur has become an important symbol for scholars, artists, and writers. The classic French female counterpart

7905-402: The suppression of all competition for the same reason. Be that as it may, in all these positions the same basic motive is at work: the person resists being leveled down and worn out by a social-technological mechanism. An inquiry into the inner meaning of specifically modern life and its products, into the soul of the cultural body, so to speak, must seek to solve the equation which structures like

7998-598: The three authors coincide in the search for and exaltation of intrinsic beauty in their objectives, regardless of quality and clarity of their references." In 1929, eleven of Atget's photographs were shown at the Film und Foto Werkbund exhibition in Stuttgart . The U.S. Library of Congress has some 20 prints made by Abbott in 1956. The Museum of Modern Art purchased the Abbott/Levy collection of Atget's work in 1968. MoMA published

8091-469: The uniformity, speed, and anonymity of modern life in the city. The concept of the flâneur is important in academic discussions of the phenomenon of modernity . While Baudelaire's aesthetic and critical visions helped open up the modern city as a space for investigation, theorists such as Georg Simmel began to codify the urban experience in more sociological and psychological terms. In his essay " The Metropolis and Mental Life ", Simmel theorized that

8184-405: Was a sign of the alienation of the city. For Benjamin, the flâneur met his demise with the triumph of consumer capitalism . In these texts, the flâneur was often juxtaposed and contrasted with the figure of the badaud , the gawker or gaper. Fournel wrote: "The flâneur must not be confused with the badaud ; a nuance should be observed there .... The simple flâneur

8277-563: Was certainly not the unknown 'primitive' 'tramp' or 'Douanier Rousseau of the street' that they took him for; he had, since 1900, as counted by Alain Fourquier, 182 reproductions of 158 images in 29 publications and had sold, between 1898 and 1927 and beyond the postcards he published, sometimes more than 1000 pictures a year to public institutions including the Bibliothèque Nationale , Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris , Musée Carnavalet , Musée de Sculpture Comparé, École des Beaux-Arts ,

8370-857: Was his notebook, known by the word Repertoire on its cover (the French repertoire meaning a thumb-indexed address book or directory, but also defined, aptly in actor Atget's case, as 'a stock of plays, dances, or items that a company or a performer knows or is prepared to perform'). The book is now in the MoMA collection, and in it he recorded the names and addresses of 460 clients; architects, interior decorators, builders and their artisans skilled in ironwork, wood panelling, door knockers, also painters, engravers, illustrators, and set designers, jewellers René Lalique and Weller , antiquarians and historians, artists including Tsuguharu Foujita , Maurice de Vlaminck and Georges Braque , well-known authors, editors, publishers Armand Colin and Hachette , and professors, including

8463-604: Was not experienced as a homogeneous and fixed space, and how women used particular public spaces such as beaches, cafés, and shopping malls to experience this autonomy. Departing from Wilson's approach, Lauren Elkin 's Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London (2017) traces a number of flâneuse women in history, such as Agnès Varda , Sophie Calle , Virginia Woolf , Martha Gellhorn , focusing on their particular relationships with particular cities. In less academic contexts, such as newspaper book reviews,

8556-421: Was partly the result of later readings. Rosalind Krauss draws attention to the fact that the central theme associated with Atget’s works is the uncertainty of the boundaries of the work . It is not entirely clear what should be considered a master’s work—a single selected frame or a complete corpus of several thousand images. Atget's photographs highlighted the problem of the singularity of the work and questioned

8649-599: Was unable to determine the ownership of the twenty Atget photographs in its collection, thus suggesting that they are technically orphan works . Abbott clearly had a copyright on the selection and arrangement of his photographs in her books, which is now owned by Commerce Graphics. The Library also stated that the Museum of Modern Art, which owns the collection of Atget's negatives, reported that Atget had no heirs and that any rights on these works may have expired. Fl%C3%A2neur Flâneur ( French: [flɑnœʁ] )

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