Atget

Eugene Atget, Trianon, Versailles, 1923-24

Eugene Atget photographed what he saw. His intention was to earn a living - which he did mainly by selling prints to painters seeking guides to a particular subject or scene - while preserving some record of a Paris that was vanishing before his eyes. In both temperament and intent he was a realist.

How is it, then, that so many of his photographs are so surreal?

L'Air, St. Cloud Eugene Atget 1901

Eugene Atget, Route, Amien (before 1900)

A paradox, heightened by the fact that when Atget made these pictures, Surrealism as an art movement barely existed. Andre Breton did not write the Surrealist Manifesto until 1924, three years before Atget's death. Nor, though The Interpretation of Dreams had been published in 1900, were Freud's ideas the common currency they are today. Some Surrealist painters - Ernst, Kandinsky, DeChirico - were active just prior to World War I, but if Atget was familiar with them there is no sign of it in his work.


Eugene Atget, Fete du Trone, 1904

And unlike theirs, Atget's surrealism was neither literary nor labored. It derived not from theory or even intent but from some unintended transmutation of dreams into art.

How might that occur? Is there, perhaps, something in the nature of photography that inclines it to the surreal? Susan Sontag, for one, thought that photography is the only art that is inherently surreal, a quality she located precisely in its capacity for verisimilitude: "Surrealism lies at the heart of the photographic enterprise: in the very creation of a duplicate world, of a reality in the second degree, narrower but more dramatic than the one perceived by natural vision."

Maybe. Certainly dreams inhabit a duplicate world, narrower but more dramatic than waking life. But not all photographs attain that status. Not all photographers would want to. Atget expressed no interest in dreams. Yet there are his pictures, as dreamlike as they could be.