Inventing, collecting and classifying in the margins

Abstract

This essay proposes Eugène Atget’s work as a visual representation of Paris and its historicity. Le Gall discusses two of Atget’s photographic albums, ‘Les fortifications de Paris’ and ‘Zoniers’, not just as picturesque representations of Paris, but rather as the inauguration of a new photographic approach of the city. With these albums Atget invented novel photographic motifs and objects for history, grounding thereby his modernist photographic project, which aimed at exploring the medium’s documentary potential and at shaping history. The creation of a serial archive of a soon-to-disappear urban past, falling victim to the pressures of a rapidly changing modernity, harbours, this essay argues, a political dimension, as it documents the discontinuum between human life and urban environment, especially in the impoverished no-man-land’s exurban sites.