1986.52
Cour, 28 Rue Bonaparte, Paris
Artist
Jean Eugène Auguste Atget
(Libourne, France, 1857 - 1927, Paris, France)
Title
Cour, 28 Rue Bonaparte, Paris
Creation Date
1910
Century
20th century
Dimensions
7 1/16 in. x 8 9/16 in. (18 cm. x 21.8 cm.)
Classification
Photographs
Creation Place
Europe, France
Medium and Support
gelatin silver print
Credit Line
Museum Purchase
Copyright
Public Domain
Accession Number
1986.52
The ability of Eugène Atget’s images of streets, shop windows, and parks to seem at once straightforward and uncanny was admired by the surrealists. Atget spent his thirty-year career documenting Old Paris, taking thousands of photographs that he primarily sold to libraries and archives. In the 1920s Man Ray elevated the aging Atget from obscurity by selecting four of his photographs to be published in La Révolution Surréaliste. Many younger photographers were inspired to adopt his aesthetic of eerie emptiness in their depictions of urban streets.