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| Eugène Atget Palais Royal 1904-05 albumen silver print Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
"What photographs by their sheer accumulation attempt to banish is the collection of death, which is part and parcel of every memory image. In the illustrated magazines the world has become a photographable present and the photographed present has been entirely eternalized. Seemingly ripped from the clutch of death, in reality it has succumbed to it."
– Siegfried Kracauer, from Photography (1927)
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| Eugène Atget Fireplace, Austrian Embassy, Paris ca. 1900 albumen print Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
– Jean Baudrillard, from Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976), translated by Iaian Hamilton and published in English in 1993
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| Eugène Atget Sculpted Bull's Head, fountain wall, Paris ca. 1900 albumen print Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
"Never before has an age been so informed about itself, if being informed means having an image of objects that resembles them in a photographic sense. In reality, however, the weekly photographic ration does not at all mean to refer to these objects or images. If it were offering itself as an aid to memory, then memory would have to make the selection. But the flood of photos sweeps away the dams of memory. . . . In the illustrated magazines people see the very world that the illustrated magazines prevent them from perceiving."
– Siegfried Kracauer, from Photography (1927)
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| Eugène Atget Shop front, Quai Bourbon, Paris ca. 1900 albumen print Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
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| Eugène Atget Shop sign, Quai Bourbon, Paris ca. 1900 albumen print Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
Do not speak to people about death
Do not speak words that disappear like smoke
You cannot look at death
When (you think you look at death)
what you find there are ashes only.
– Nakagiri Masao, translated by Naoki Sakai (quoted in Translation and Subjectivity, University of Minnesota Press, 1967)
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| Eugène Atget Marble copy of the Belvedere Cleopatra, Versailles ca. 1900 albumen print Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
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| Eugène Atget Neo-Attic relief known as the Borghese Dancers, Louvre ca. 1900 albumen print Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
We have encountered the now-forgotten but once-famous marble relief known as the Borghese Dancers (above) in earlier investigations here when looking at the fate of Roman artifacts discovered, displayed and copied during the Renaissance. It came to France in the early 19th century among the Roman loot acquired by Napoleon.
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| Eugène Atget Raspail family monument by Antoine Etex Père Lachaise, Paris ca. 1900 albumen print Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
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| Eugène Atget Observatory at château (1695) at Meudon, with storm effect ca. 1900 albumen print Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
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| Eugène Atget File of statues at Versailles ca. 1900 albumen print Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
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| Eugène Atget Pool at Versailles ca. 1900 albumen print Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
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| Eugène Atget Statues of children at Versailles ca. 1900 albumen print Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
"We tend to perceive photographs as fragments of the external world because the photographer is, for the present, limited to visible subjects. Yet the photographers accomplish an act steeped in contradiction, for while photographs are indeed no more than fragments, and no more than the visible, they call into question the meaning of all experience."
– Koji Taki, translated by Linda Hoaglund and published in Provoke (New York, 1999)
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| Eugène Atget Ornamental vase at Versailles ca. 1900 albumen print Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
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| Eugène Atget Files of small fountains at Versailles ca. 1900 albumen print Victoria & Albert Museum, London |