“THE BEGINNING OF MODERN PHOTOGRAPHY”

ATGET, Eugene. Atget Photographe de Paris. Préface par Pierre Mac-Orlan. New York: E. Weyhe, [1930]. Quarto, original gilt-stamped burgundy moiré cloth. $2400.

First edition, American issue, of the first monograph on Atget, with 96 sepia-toned photogravure plates of Paris that offer “exquisite visual pleasure” and featuring Berenice Abbott’s frontispiece portrait of Atget.

Beginning in the late 1890s Eugène Atget produced over 8,500 images of Paris, many on fragile glass negatives—a perspective "seen by many as the beginning of modern photography" (Roth, 60). The 97 splendid gravures in this scarce first monograph on Atget offer "exquisite visual pleasure—the most striking images from more than 30 years documenting the streets, buildings, parks and gardens of Old Paris… 'The viewer of these images falls prey to a loveliness unbounded… enveloped in reserves of poignancy." As a young Walker Evans wrote of this volume, Atget's vision proclaims a "'lyrical understanding of the street, trained observation of it, special feeling for patina, eye for revealing detail, over all of which is thrown a poetry which is not 'the poetry of the street' or the 'poetry of Paris' but the projection of Atget's person" (Parr & Badger I:127). In describing Atget's influence, MoMA curator John Szarkowski hailed him as "a photographer of such authority and originality that his work remains a bench mark against which much of most sophisticated contemporary photography measures itself" (Looking at Photographs, 64). "Published simultaneously in American, French and German editions on the occasion of a one-man exhibition at the renowned Weyhe Gallery in New York." Featuring Berenice Abbott's frontispiece portrait of Atget: "gazing off into the far distance, as if into the future he helped create." Text in French by Pierre Mac Orlan, who "penned some of the best and most provocative writing ever about photography" (Roth, 60). Without slipcase, rarely found. Open Book, 90.

Fine condition.