From Pompeii to Paris: ghostly cityscapes and the ruins of modernity in Théophile Gautier and Eugène Atget

Abstract

This article explores visions of urbanity in the second half of the nineteenth century through Théophile Gautier’s writings and Eugène Atget’s photography, where the city appears depopulated, disembodied, and haunted by the clutter of mundane urban furnishings. Viewed through the prism of a new discipline (archaeology) by Gautier and a new medium (photography) by Atget, ruined buildings, decaying streets, graffiti, and enseignes, cart tracks and dingy storefronts configure an aesthetics of modernity. This aesthetics exploits the potential of the marginal, fragmentary, and disjointed debris of modernity to define urbanity in the absence of the human element. The ‘rags’ and ‘refuse’ from which Benjamin would later construct his Arcades allow Gautier and Atget to articulate a creative tension between the fragments of historical layers, imbued with the memory of humanity, and their impact on the viewer. The deserted cityscape becomes a narrative strategy with epistemological and ontological implications in the spatiotemporal experience of urbanity: in this space, the banal, unintentional detail comes to articulate urban and/or modern identities.