3 Inventing, collecting and classifying in the margins
-
Guillaume Le Gall
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.
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.
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Front matter i
- Contents v
- List of figures viii
- Notes on contributors xii
- Acknowledgements xvii
- Introduction 1
-
Acknowledgements
- Introduction 29
- 1 Prehistoric Proust 33
- 2 Fantômas and the shudder of history 54
- 3 Inventing, collecting and classifying in the margins 72
- 4 The anxious centre 88
- 5 1913, the year of the arrière-garde? 109
-
Acknowledgements
- Introduction 123
- 6 A modernism that has not yet been 127
- 7 On situating French modernism 145
- 8 Les Caves du Vatican and the real novel 163
- 9 1913, between peace and war 173
-
Acknowledgements
- Introduction 193
- 10 Camille Flammarion’s flash-forward 197
- 11 How ‘simultaneous’ is it? 220
- 12 Mallarmé’s modernity in 1913 237
- 13 Poetry displaced 252
- 14 Behind Picasso’s pins 274
-
Part IV: Coda: on modernism, beyond France and 1913
- 15 1913, the future in the past 299
- 16 The paradox and promise of the ‘new’ French Modernist Studies 310
- Index 325
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Front matter i
- Contents v
- List of figures viii
- Notes on contributors xii
- Acknowledgements xvii
- Introduction 1
-
Acknowledgements
- Introduction 29
- 1 Prehistoric Proust 33
- 2 Fantômas and the shudder of history 54
- 3 Inventing, collecting and classifying in the margins 72
- 4 The anxious centre 88
- 5 1913, the year of the arrière-garde? 109
-
Acknowledgements
- Introduction 123
- 6 A modernism that has not yet been 127
- 7 On situating French modernism 145
- 8 Les Caves du Vatican and the real novel 163
- 9 1913, between peace and war 173
-
Acknowledgements
- Introduction 193
- 10 Camille Flammarion’s flash-forward 197
- 11 How ‘simultaneous’ is it? 220
- 12 Mallarmé’s modernity in 1913 237
- 13 Poetry displaced 252
- 14 Behind Picasso’s pins 274
-
Part IV: Coda: on modernism, beyond France and 1913
- 15 1913, the future in the past 299
- 16 The paradox and promise of the ‘new’ French Modernist Studies 310
- Index 325
