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 century. Photographs were, generally, calculated things. So many of these moments captured with Engle's hidden camera feel so fragile and ephemeral, so vividly real. You instantly feel how qualitatively different these photographs are from what we see produced in that period.

I highly recommend this book if you are interested in photography or the visual arts in general.

From the publisher:

This rare cache of early photographs, salvaged and printed by the author, reveals an authentic view of life in the late 19th century America with a photographic vision that was fifty years ahead of its time. An unposed, candid record of people and activities in rural areas and towns of Pennsylvania and Virginia in the 1880's, these images have a quality of unstrained honesty and freshness that is in marked contrast to the stilted, formal portraits of the period. Professor Leo's text reveals the unconscious artistry of the photographer Horace Engle (1861–1949), a native of Marietta, PA, who was a chemist, promoter, inventor, and researcher at the Edison labs, as well as a lifelong amateur photographer. Engle's pioneering candid photographs—taken with a Gray/Stirn concealed vest camera—display photography's special ability to capture a truly significant moment. This is the basis of much of today's reportorial and documentary photography. Engel's camera, however, had no viewfinder, and offered only one shutter speed and lens opening. His 1888 images, therefore, are remarkable examples of a photographic style which did not come into its own until the era of the picture magazines. Since very few prints made by early detective cameras such as the Gray/Stirn exist, this collection is an impressive example of a very rare photographic type and provides a valuable and authentic view of a vanished past.

Stirn concealed vest camera (19th century)