Photography in its early days was hailed as a technology which could capture reality with perfect fidelity and provide an objective record of a person or place just as it was at a given moment. In this respect it was seen as an advancement over drawing, painting and sculpture which must always involve a measure of subjectivity.
Atget’s work has a curious and compelling authenticity about it. A result, it seems to me, of a combination of atmospheric elements (rain, fog, a wan sunbeam), subtle gradations of shadow and light; the dully near-monochromatic gray/sepia hues; a feeling that we are looking in on a single atomized moment in time that is also, somehow outside of and beyond time — the very soul of the old photograph. Atget’s pictures are documentary in nature: inert, speechless, making no effort to persuade or cajole or claim a point of view. So substantial and so consistent in subject matter and visual impact, it’s easy to lose sight of the ways that they are likewise strangely inauthentic. As is so often the case, their seeming artlessness conceals a good deal of technical skill, shrewd judgment and an eye trained to see what it wants to see.
Paris, after all, never really looked like this, or could have. The overall impression one gets from thumbing through a collection of Aget’s photos is of a kind of city of the dead, wherein what we know to be a busy, buzzing, talkative, marvelous, scurrilous, serious, frivolous, ambitious, brainy, fleshy, argumentative metropolis is reduced to a vacant shell of itself. As represented to us by Atget, the cafés and bars and department stores are empty, the streets devoid of the horses, carriages and teeming population that made the city what it was in his day. Your correspondent is no art historian or cultural critic, but he knows better than to overlook an analogy when he stubs his toe on one.
In the world of wine we know today, there are a good many would-be Atgets, busy documenting in minute detail the natural, physical structures that are responsible, so they say, for wine as we know it. They would direct our attention to the soils and sub-soils, slopes, escarpments, declinations and micro-climates (as they’re known) as the primary sources of character in the wine produced under their influence. For all of which there is something to be said. But to claim that a given wine can be fully explained by the natural physical infrastructure that informed the fruit it was made from, is as nonsensical as to say that Paris could still be Paris, at any point in time, without the people of Paris.
It was the people of Paris, after all, who built and rebuilt the city over generations, drew the plans for its architecture and chose the building materials, laid out its streets, squares, parks and gardens. In the same way, it has been people, rather than rocks or rainwater, who, over centuries, invented and re-invented wine and winemaking, choosing from among innumerable options the vines that gave the most suitable fruit and the places where they gave the best results; who experimented with technique and ceaselessly taste-tested the results to settle on just what, in that time and place, gave them what they considered to be drinkable, satisfying wine.
It’s never finished business. Nor can it be. Tastes change, it’s true. But we’re learning these days that those natural conditions we’ve taken for granted for so long can change too, sometimes abruptly, and that nature doesn’t necessarily take our interests into consideration. That’s our job.
I love an album of old photos. I just don’t want to live in one.