Many paths lead to fame. The case of Eugène Atget (1857-1927), a French photographer of the early 20th century, is a special story that he himself did not live to see. Atget worked quietly, often taking his photos of Parisian street scenes in the early hours of the morning. His mysterious-looking works are also documents of the rapid change that the city underwent around 1900. The exhibition Eugène Atget: The Making of a Reputation at the International Center of Photography recounts how Atget's photographs became famous. This is mainly thanks to the photographer Berenice Abbott (1898-1991), who met Atget a year before his death. The show runs until May 4 in New York.
Eugène Atget initially worked as an actor, but a lack of success soon prompted him to turn his hobby into a profession. So he wandered through Paris with his heavy large-format camera and documented alleys, buildings, carriages, shop windows, and the inhabitants of the capital. In doing so, he captured an era that, just a few years later, would become a thing of the past due to modernization, such as the advent of the automobile. Atget sold his pictures cheaply to tourists and artists, especially Man Ray, who lived on the same street. Man Ray made the pictures known among the Surrealists, claiming that they displayed surrealistic traits even before this art movement existed. Atget, however, resisted this, seeing his pictures as pure documentation. Berenice Abbott inherited Man Ray's collection after his death in 1976 and published Atget's work. It was not until 50 years after his death that Atget became famous. Today, he is considered an important pioneer of documentary photography.
