March 22, 2005
Fragments: Eugene Atget & Walter Benjamin
Two images:
Eugene Atget, Place Du Tertre,1922.
Eugene Atget, Notre Dame, 1925
These images of Paris in the 1920s are fragments of a body of work. They can be juxtaposed to fragments from Walter Benjamin's unfinished Arcades project. He writes:
"The street becomes a dwelling for the flaneur; he is as much at home among the facades of houses as a citizen is in his four walls. To him the shiny, enamelled signs of businesses are at least as good a wall ornament as an oil painting is to the bourgeois in his salon. The walls are the desk against which he presses his notebooks; news-stands are his libraries and the terraces of cafes are the balconies from which he looks down on his household after his work is done."1938
The streets of Paris were Atget's home.
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