Eugène Atget

albumen print, titled and numbered '408' and with date in pencil on the reverse, 1913

Sotheby's London, 10 May 2001, Sale 1271, Lot 382

Molly Nesbit, Atget's Seven Albums (New Haven, 1992), p. 408

Grading this albumen print on a scale of 1 to 10--a 10 being an albumen print with rich dark tones and highlights that retain all of their original detail--this print rates a 10. This exceptionally rendered print has a deep, reddish-eggplant tonality and warm, creamy highlights. There is very minimal fading along the lower and right edges, which does not diminish in any way the fine appearance of this print. When the print is examined very closely in high raking light, various soft and sharp handling creases that do not appear to break the emulsion are visible throughout. The print is trimmed to the image, resulting in somewhat irregular edges. Part of the negative number - '4' - is just visible along the left edge.
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This photograph comes from a series 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.  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.  In its documentation of a Paris that was rapidly being modernized, Atget’s work is an extension of Charles Marville’s photographic survey of the changing city in the 1860s (see Lot 116).