Road Trip - Eugene Atget

A few months ago we did a rather ambitious day trip to Sydney to see the Eugene Atget exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Sydney isn't an easy day trip for us (8 hours in the car is a bit off putting), but I was very keen to see this exhibition, and this was our only chance before it closed.

Eugene Atget (1857-1927) was a French photographer who set out to document the 'Old Paris', which was disappearing after the demolitions and modernisation of Baron Haussmann. This exhibition was mainly photographs on loan from Musee Carnavalet in Paris (another Musee definitely on the hit list for this year), along with some of Man Ray's collection of Atget photographs, and a few from other galleries. Man Ray lived on the same Parisian street as Eugene and was responsible for introducing his work to the Parisian avant-garde "who were inspired by the mysterious and poetic visions of the city."

I hadn't heard of Eugene before seeing the publicity for this exhibition, possibly because this was the first major exhibition of his work in Australia. Then when I read The Flaneur last year, there was Eugene too. 

Eugene Atget, an obsessed photographer who was determined to document every corner of Paris before it disappeared under the assulat of modern 'improvements'. He had been born in 1857 near Bordeaux and as a young man had worked variously as a sailor, actor and painter. Penniless but driven, Atget carried his tripod, view camera and glass plates everywhere with him, shooting all the monuments but also the fading advertisements painted on a wall, the dolls in a shop window, the rain-slick cobbled street, the door knocker, the quay, the stairwell, even the grain of the wood steps. He photographed the grand salon of the Austrian embassy but also street vendors hawking baskets and the humble horse-drawn fiacre waiting for a customer. He wore his voluminous cape everywhere, carrying his heavy equipment in hands that had been badly scarred by developing solutions. 

Big cities always have interesting things going on, as well as exhibitions.

This dog appeared to have a camera strapped to it's head!

I was excited to see a tagged cockatoo
(turns out that he is Mr Squiggle)
bird research teaming up with social media-
folks on facebook love them

No trip to Sydney is complete without
at least a glimpse of the Harbour