Eugene Atget (1857-1927) spent nearly thirty years photographing details of often-inconspicuous buildings, side streets, cul-de-sacs, and public sculptures in his beloved Paris. Yet before his
death, he was practically unknown outside of that city. His genius was first recognized about 1924 by two young Americans living and working in Paris, Man Ray and his studio assistant, Berenice
Abbott, who recognized the elements of contradiction, ambivalence, and ambiguity in Atget's images of Parisian architecture, streets, and parks.
Presented in this volume are more than fifty of the Getty Museum's two hundred ninety-five pictures by Atget, with commentary on each image by Gordon Baldwin, associate curator of photographs
at the J. Paul Getty Museum. In Focus: Eugene Atget also contains a chronological overview of his life and an edited transcript of a colloquium on his career, with participants Baldwin; David
Featherstone, independent editor and curator; photographer Robbert Flick, professor of art at the University of Southern California; independent scholar David Harris; Weston Naef, curator of
photographs, Getty Museum; Francoise Reynaud, curator of photographs at the Musee Carnavalet, Paris; and Michael S. Roth, associate director of the Getty Research Institute. This volume of the
In Focus series is published to coincide with an exhibit of Atget's images from June 20 through October 18, 2000, at the Getty Museum.
