Eugene Atget Biography
Eugène Atget (Libourne, 12 February 1857 – Paris, 4 August 1927) was a French photographer. He was orphaned at five years old and in 1875 he joined the merchant navy, working as a cabin boy for two years. In 1878 he returned to Paris and entered the conservatory. In 1885 he joined a traveling theater company: despite the poor results, this job allowed him to meet the woman who would become the woman of his life, Valentine Delafosse-Compagnon. Due to a vocal cord infection he abandoned the theater, dedicating himself to painting, drawing and photography. He therefore decided to devote himself to photography intensively, as he believed he could provide painters, designers and architects with the documentation they needed to carry out their work. He thus began to sell his citizen subjects around Paris, until the National Library of France took notice of him and purchased the entire collection of his photos. The years after 1900 were difficult for Atget and his wife. Despite their excellent clientele (Braque, Derain, de Vlaminck), the two were not in good economic conditions, so much so that in the 1920s Atget gradually stopped taking photographs. Valentine died in 1926, and Eugène followed her on 4 August 1927. His fortune was essentially posthumous, even if an exponent of Surrealism like Man Ray, his neighbor in the studio in rue Campagne-Première in Montparnasse, had already appreciated his work for some time work and published a photograph of him on the cover of the magazine La Révolution Surréaliste. Thanks to Berenice Abbott, Man Ray's assistant, and the gallery owner Julian Levi, a large part of his archive was able to be preserved, and has been preserved by the Museum of Modern Art in New York since 1968. Defined by Berenice Abbott as the "Balzac of photography", he is today considered among the great photographers of the twentieth century.
