Eugene Atget noticed that there was a demand for pictures of the old Paris and he spent the early part of his photographic career building up a portfolio of work and clients in this field. His work included photographing old buildings, street vendors, architectural details and buildings that were about to be demolished.
Much of his work was aimed at artists and stage designers who would use his photographs as visual aids for their own work.
Atget used only an old wooden 18 x 24cm camera rather than anything modern at the time, as he said that they worked faster than he could think.
In 1920 he sold 2,500 negatives of his work to the Caisse National des Monuments Historiques for around 10,000 francs. This gave him the financial freedom to pursue a more personal preference in his work, which included domestic interiors of people of various social classes, neglected statues, portraits and close up work.
Many of Atget's clients were more interested in the detail of the picture rather than in any photographic art and this reflected in his work. Often his own shadow can be seen in his work.
The use of an old heavy camera and a wide-angle lens to capture more detail in his work often caused radical perspectives and vignetting in the upper corners.
He also liked to use long exposures and slow plate films which would cause halation and blurs from moving objects.
He would often work early in the morning to avoid people appearing in his work and in doing so some of his work appears very dreamlike and deserted.
These traits in his work although unimportant Atget himself is what many collectors have to come to love about his work.
Atget used a view camera with a bellows placed on a tripod, typical of the second half of the 19th century. He worked with 18 × 24 cm negative glass plates, oriented to obtain either a vertical or horizontal photograph. A tilt-shift technique was used to make perspective corrections. This resulted in vignetting (a circular shadow around the edges of the image), a phenomenon seen in a number of Atget’s photographs.
Atget always used gelatin-silver negative glass plates, 1.5mm thick. The plate was held in the camera in a wooden frame by clips that left characteristic marks on many of the prints. A long exposure time resulted in numerous blurs caused by the presence of moving people or objects. Atget developed the negatives himself and wrote the negative number directly onto the gelatin with a pointed stiletto.
Atget made all of his own photographic prints using a technique in which light-sensitive paper, in contact with the glass negative, was printed-out in natural light (never developed). The printing-out process proceeded until Atget determined that the image had the proper density. The photograph was then washed, gold toned, fixed and washed again. Atget’s prints are never black-and-white; their tone varies from deep sepia to violet-brown. Atget was capable of producing high-quality prints but there is great variation in these today depending on his printing and toning techniques and the way his photographs were preserved and exhibited. He never enlarged his photographs.
Albumen
The light-sensitive emulsion was formed by silver chloride introduced into an albumen binder (beaten egg whites). The majority of Atget’s prints were on albumen paper. He turned to other processes after the First World War, when such paper could no longer be found on the market
Matt Albumen
After the war Atget used another kind of industrially produced printing-out paper with a Matt surface
Aristotype
Atget chose a commercially manufactured printing-out paper made with gelatin. Aesthetically similar to albumen prints, although thicker and with a glossier surface, the process was the same for toning and printing. Some of these prints have yellow stains from sulphuration due to poor processing of the image (such as the use of an exhausted fixing bath or insufficient washing).
Parks and Gardens.
Atget made many of his most moving and meditative photographs in the last decade of his life at the parks and gardens in and around Paris. He had worked at most of them—Versailles, Saint-Cloud, and the Luxembourg Garden—since early in his career, but these late photographs have a qualitatively different sensibility: formally bold and synthetic, they are also atmospheric, mysterious, and resonant. Their significance for Atget is suggested by the separate sub series that he set up for each near the end of his life: "Versailles," "Saint-Cloud," "Sceaux," and "Parisian Parks."
Below: Atget Fountain.
The reason I want to recreate this photograph is because there is a park in Doncaster where I come from, that has a similar flower feature, like water fountain in Atget's image. It resembles a similar subject matter. Atget photographed this park early in the morning so before university I had a walk to the park. Atget did this because he preferred photographing when there is no one around, s I took a similar approach.
My Atget Images:
My first image, is more toned in sepia, more contrasty and has more shadows and highlights in it. In post production I have added a harsh sepia toning. For composition, I closely observed the edges of each image where everything ends or begins, the ground slightly in the foreground before the start of the fountain. The camera angle from the front, but down below more at eye level. Ive photographed in a morning with a digital camera. My ISO of 200, my aperture of 11, and shutter speed of 125.
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