Eugene Atget

Eugene Atget - February 12th 1857 – August 4^th 1927. He was a French photographer who was noticed for his photographs documenting the architecture and street scenes of Paris. He was an inspiration for the surrealists as well as other artists, his work only started to get noticed a lot more after his death. Atget photographed Paris using a large-format wooden bellows camera with a rapid rectilinear lens. The images that he took were exposed and developed on glass dry plates. Because of how he took and presented his photographs they appear quite dream like, he used long exposure which helps to make his images look this way. His photographs documented the environment in which he lived in, and how he viewed it, some of his photographs have more detail than others. There sense a lot of stillness within his photographs as they don’t have people within them due to the fact he is using the long exposure time. These are the reasons that I like Eugene Atget’s work, I really like the stillness of them, and how you can see what he felt through his photos, I think the fact that he uses long exposure time makes his photos more effective, they don’t capture the movement of people therefore the streets look empty and very lonely and kind of ghostly, it gives a very early feeling as it looks like the city has been deserted and nobody lives there anymore.