Eugène Atget

Butterfield & Butterfield, San Francisco, 17 November 1999, Lot 4048

Berenice Abbott, The World of Atget (New York, 1964), pl. 135

Molly Nesbit, Atget’s Seven Albums (New Haven: Yale University, 1992), pl. 12

Atget’s Paris (Paris, 1992), p. 776

John Szarkowski et al., Atget (New York, 2000), p. 76

In Focus: Eugène Atget (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2000), p. 58

Kevin Moore, Old Paris and Changing New York: Photographs by Eugène Atget and Berenice Abbott (Cincinnati: FotoFocus and the Taft Museum of Art, 2018), p. 58

This photograph comes from a series Eugène Atget undertook to document Paris’s zone militaire. The site of decaying early 19^th-century fortifications, forever on the brink of redevelopment, the zone had become, in the early 20^th century, a sort of no-mans-land and a refuge for the city’s chiffoniers, or ragpickers. These zoniers are rarely present in Atget’s photographs, but their rag-laden carts, caravans, and makeshift residences are captured with Atget’s objective clarity. In the present image, the dwelling pictured is decorated with stuffed animals, dolls, and garlands of leaves. Nowhere in his vast body of work is the egalitarian nature of Atget’s camera more apparent than in his photographs of the lumpen environment of the zoniers. 

Prints of this image have been located at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (94.XM.108.6); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1.1969.991); and in a private collection.