Gelatin silver printing-out-paper print
Near the end of his life, Atget, who had made thousands of documents of Paris and its inhabitants since the end of the nineteenth century, became known to the Surrealists thanks to his neighbor in Montmartre, Man Ray. The avant-garde group found Atget’s photographs of shop windows, streets, urban dwellers, and architecture to be ripe with suggestive details. Several of his pictures appeared in the journal La Révolution surréaliste in 1926, including this image of the spectacle of a crowd gathered to observe an eclipse. Reflecting on Atget’s influence, the German philosopher Walter Benjamin remarked in 1931 that Surrealist photography was “nothing but a literary refinement of motifs that Atget discovered.”
517: A Surreal Lens, 2025
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Eugène Atget
French, 1857–1927 2996 works onlineWorking in and around Paris for some 35 years, in a career that bridged the 19th and 20th centuries, Eugène Atget created an encyclopedic, idiosyncratic lived portrait of that city on the cusp of the modern era.
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Photography
For much of the history of the medium, a photograph was defined as a chemical image rendered visible by the action of light on photosensitive compounds.
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A Surreal Lens
Gallery 517In 1924, André Breton published his Manifesto of Surrealism, which, guided by Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theories, declared a radical break from the rationalism of modern society in favor of imagination, erotic desire, and unconscious thought.
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