art
Paris Changing
More than 100 years ago, an intrepid French photographer named Eugène Atget set about the systemic visual cataloguing of Paris, the “city gorged with dreams.” In 1888, “with the marvelling lens of dream and surprise” (as the poet Robert Desnos remarked), Atget began a 20 year project documenting the cobbled grit of city streets, the merchant’s stalls of jardin du Luxembourg, shop windows, parks, all manner of people from flâneurs to flower vendors, crafting a meticulous visual lexicon of Paris’ urban, architectural and social history.
Nearly a century later, Portland photographer Christopher Rauschenberg (Blue Sky Photographic Gallery founder and son of legendary artist Robert) spent a year taking his own walks along la rue des Mauvais Garçons and streets that Atget trudged down with his primitive 18 X 24 cm view camera to rephotograph Atget’s beloved city. Not unlike The Portland Grid Project, Rauschenberg et al’s decade-long project, his new book, Paris Changing: Eugène Atget’s Paris, presents a moving and evocative (albeit slightly more exotic) stand off between history and progress, preservation and decay.
Like Cartier-Bresson or Saul Bellow’s Sammler, who trawled the streets of New York taking in “aesthetic consumption of the environment,” these kinds of discrete projects give us a lens into the found poetry of the city that is priceless. As Rauschenberg’s said elsewhere, “You can see the effects of acid rain on them; you can see the effects of graffiti; most of
all, you can see that the magical streets of Paris are now thickly covered with parked cars. . .among all the other Parises that co-exist so thickly in one amazing city, Atget’s Paris is still definitely and hauntingly there.”
Rauschenberg will sign copies of his book—published by Princeton Architectural Press and featuring 74 of the photographer’s sublime echoes of Atget—on Monday evening at 7:20 PM Powell’s (1005 W Burnside).
–Tim DuRoche
