If You Like Atget…

I’m an admirer of the “empty” aesthetic of Atget, that Buddhist mutei he found embodied in the pre-dawn, peopleless streets and parks of Paris and environs.

Just before the golden hours are the Atget hours.

I get from those photographs what I get from the best haiku: the inexpressible which cleanses the mind and (more importantly) the spirit. This can lead to continual rebirth. For me, those aren’t photographs to be looked at once or twice and “done.” For me, those are photographs which can renew vision itself, when one revisits them in the right mindset. I’m not sure that’s why the French surrealists championed Atget, but it’s my reason for championing him.

De Chirico’s early paintings have the same effect on me. After all these years, they still energize my seeing and tweak my perspective (with their confected sense of perspective).

Only recently has the photography of Pennsylvania native Horace Engle come to wider attention. MoMA has inducted his body of work into their pantheon of photography and rightly so.

I’ve just received the book Other Summers: The Photographs of Horace Engle and am enjoying and absorbing it now.

Many of the photographs are sui generis for their period. As the book copy below points out, candid photography had not yet come into its own in the nineteenth…