a blog about pinhole camera photography, life, practice and the attainment of wisdom
23 January 2010
No Marker for Atget?
So I ask myself 'Paris, with a marker on every other old building... 'Mazarin's mistress farted here' or 'Stendhal's cousin caught the clap there' ... so why is there no marker at 17bis rue Campagne Primier? This was the home of Eugene Atget, the photographer of Paris par excellence! Successor to Baldus and Marville in the documentation of the great physical and social change going on in Paris, its destruction and re-invention and predecessor to Doisneau and Cartier-Bresson. A genius and either the last romantic or the first modernist, depending on your disposition, yet there is nothing to mark the home that he had for decades, just up the street from Man Ray and Berenice Abbott, a few paces from the Passage d'Enfer - one of my favorite street names in Paris. On my last trip back I made pilgrimage to see his home, at least from the street, and to record as he might have done a Parisian doorway. This is the portal that he passed thru so many times, lugging his heavy pack of camera, plates and tripod from Montparnasse to the 'Zones', from Raspail to the Parc de Saint-Cloud. So again I ask, why no memorial to one of the greatest of photographers in the city of which he is the formost photographic memoirist?
"I've finally figured out what's wrong with photography. It's a one-eyed man looking thru a little 'ole. Now how much reality can there be in that?"
from 'The Brothers Bloom'
"...you can look at the most menial every day
thing, and depending upon how your pinhole eats the
light, it's warped and peculiar and imperfect. It's not
reproduction, it's storytelling."
Thomas Comerford
"Optically, pinhole images, because they are created by diffraction, are a recording of diffracted light. The impresssion created by diffracted light upon film emulsion is different from an impression left by refracted light (light which passes thru a lens). The difference is physical, the results are visible. Video, whose images are electronic, pixel-based rather than photomechanical, is a completely different image. An image is tied to its medium and the medium is part of an image's meaning, whether or not it is acknowledged by the maker or a majority of viewers." Thomas Comerford http://www.thomascomerford.net/film.html
Photographer, stenopist, using as primitive an optical device to make as sophisticated an image as possible, time - not just light - as the structuring element of a photograph
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