Paris Changing: Revisiting Eugene Atget's Paris Book

This is a fascinating and oddly pleasant book of approximately century-old photographs of Paris street scenes taken by the renowned French photographer Eugene Atget, with the same scenes rephotographed around 100 years later by the American photographer Chris Rauschenberg, the son of the famous artist Robert Rauschenberg.

The photographs include architectural details, such as exterior church sculptures, sculptures in parks, doors, courtyards, important fountains that include sculptures, street and park stairways. Many times, the grime of the bygone era has been removed from structures - which are now spiffed up, renovated, yet still are underneath the later "improvements, ancient." Amazingly, in some scenes the same trees are there - 100 years later, their branches are thicker, graphically showing the march of time. Some statuary is eroded by modern-day pollution - as are some architectural details, but some either remains untouched or was restored at some point. Some "humble" structures were cleaned up and modernized - and have become upscale, attesting to the march of gentrification. In one pair of photographs, an advertising kiosk still stands at the same place 100 years later - but looking closely, you can tell it is not exactly the same kiosk; it's a reproduction of the old kiosk, but not the same one as 100 years ago.

Much has changed, but also much has stayed the same - it's strangely pleasant to compare each pair of photographs to pick up the changes and what has stayed the same. I found this book endlessly fascinating and absorbing; of course the photos themselves are of the highest quality, with Rauschenberg's modern-day photos managing to establish a stylistic dialog with those of Atget, despite the decades that separate them and the advent of modernity.

I'm happy Chris became an established, evidently successful and well-known photographer - I actually was casually friendly with him around 50 years ago, when he was a student at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, where I was visiting a school mate with whom I had attended HS in NYC; Chris was part of my friend's social circle so I met him through her back then a few times. I'm glad he has made a mark in the field of photography - his photos in this book are in fact truly beautiful and evocative in their own right, and he notes in a brief afterword that he has photographed many Paris street scenes which still contain traces of old/"ancient" Paris that Atget did not photograph; a few of these photographs are appended.

The three essays that accompany the photos are quite interesting, informative about Atget's career as a photographer, and the lucky happenstance that led to the rescue of his sublime photographic work from obscurity, probably oblivion.

Here's some quotes from Clark Worswick's essay:

"...by the time Atget took up photographing Paris between 1897 and 1899, the documentation of European urban subjects by commercial photographers was drawing to a close. During the later part of the 1890s, an era that increasingly came to be dominated by amateurs wielding Kodak cameras, the world-wide demand for commercial photography of urban scenes went into a steep and radical decline."

"Talking about the pictures Atget sold during his lifetime, [Berenice] Abbott [the rescuer of Atget's work] once remarked: "The price of his photographs was indicative of the value placed on photographs by this French clientele. Masterpieces of photography sold for pennies. The prices ranged from .25 to 1.25 francs in 1911.""