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Eugène Atget's Trees: Newly Discovered Photographs from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France | 
 enlarge | Author: Sylvie Aubenas
Creator: Eugene Atget
Publisher: D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, Inc.
Category: Book
Buy New: $595.00
New (4) Used (2) from $535.00
Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 1630253
Format: Box Set
Media: Leather Bound
Edition: English Ed
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 96
Shipping Weight (lbs): 5.8
Dimensions (in): 17.2 x 12.2 x 1.3
ISBN: 1891024671
Dewey Decimal Number: 779.944
EAN: 9781891024672
ASIN: 1891024671
Publication Date: November 2, 2003
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
When EugAne Atget was still alive, photographs and photographers were considered in a different light than they are today. At that time, no one would have dreamed of considering Atget an artist; he himself seems to have concurred, maintaining that the pictures he sold--at a price of 1 to 3 francs--were no more than documents. Libraries and museums constituted some of his most important clients; between 1900 and 1927, the Department of Prints and Photography of the BibliothAque Nationale de France acquired thousands of his views of "old Paris." The manner of selecting these works remains obscure, but in 1995, after a laborious round of locating and classifying the historical photographs held by the department, a group of 39 hitherto unknown images by Atget were discovered. These studies of trees in the park at Saint-Cloud are essentially portraits of trees, some full-length, some details of roots or trunks--each a uniquely stark, high contrast abstraction of a genteel forest through the seasons. Found in their original envelope in the libraries archives, they had remained essentially untouched since they being purchased in July 1923. The envelope originally contained 111 photographs, bought for the sum total of 333 francs; the balance of the images featured more typical views of balustrades, statues, and terraces, and were published in a documentary volume on the park. The 39 images reproduced here for the first time were considered too abstract to stand as proper documentation. Without a framework for understanding such an image an artwork, they almost disappeared.
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| Customer Reviews:
Beautiful Atget Book May 14, 2004
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
This extraordinary book should be of interest to Atget fans for several reasons that are not apparent from the description offered. The plates are hand tipped, and the reproductions are splendid, capturing the atmosphere of Atget's prints. The book is listed as hardcover, but the binding is a clamshell construction, so that the pages of the book are protected while the book is stored. Also, what is not obvious is that the book has been produced in a very limited edition of only 1000 numbered copies, and most likely will become unavailable soon. Of the images in the book, I think that any Atget fan knows that trees were a favorite subject of his, and some of the images feel very familiar. But what this sequence of photographs reveals through multiple images of the same trees is something of the working methods of the photographer. At least some of the images are of places and trees that most photographers would pass by as not likely to produce an image of lasting interest, but Atget manages to produce photographs full of grace and mystery, and to transform the ordinary into something lush and satisfying. How he managed to accomplish this is, of course, unknowable, but it is precisely this magic that draws us to his work.
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