Indepth Arts News:
"Richard Wentworth/Eugene Atget: Faux Amis"
2001-10-05 until 2001-11-18
Photographer's Gallery
London, ,
UK
In this unusual exhibition, Richard Wentworth's
extraordinary series of photographs Making Do
and Getting By(1974-2001), is brought into
dialogue with the work of Frenchman, Eugène
Atget, a figure who stands at the beginning of
thinking about photography and Modernism.
Both Atget and Wentworth are authors of
photographic compendia which describe the
great cities of London and Paris poised at two
very different moments of change - at the
twentieth century's beginning and at its end. For
both, the city is a vivid yet fugitive place,
continually undergoing cycles of renovation,
disintegration and renewal once more. Its
pavements are a 'stage' for social activity, and its
physical details, however fleeting, full of meaning
about the nature of an urban society - and what
the individuals within it, own, do, make and
improvise.
In the last decade of the nineteenth century,
Eugène Atget (1857-1927), a repertory actor with
a flagging career, turned to photography. Over
the next thirty years, he produced an
inexhaustible stream of photographs
documenting every corner of a Paris entering the
new century. With the intention of selling his
'documents' to painters, set designers and
craftsmen, Atget built up a massive inventory -
some 8,500 photographs - of the city's streets,
alleys, shopfronts, and peripheral zones: street
by street, building by building, door knocker by
door knocker. He divided his work into 13
categories - among them the ambulatory street
traders of Paris (plate menders, lampshade
makers, baguette sellers); the vehicles of the city
(59 horse-drawn contraptions and one
steam-roller); domestic interiors across the class
spectrum (including his own which he coyly
described as the home of 'Mr R, dramatic artist'),
and the glazed shop fronts and mannequin-filled
displays that were to so enthuse the Surrealists.
Although separated by a century in time, it is
perhaps not so far from Atget's extraordinary
Zoniers album - photographs of the colony of
ragpickers and scrap merchants living in shanty
towns on the edge of Paris - to Richard
Wentworth's scrap-sifting street traders on the
Caledonian Road. Both squeeze the last drops of
economic value from objects which might be
deemed commodities in the morning, and rubbish
by evening. It is this battle with utility which
intrigues Wentworth, as he documents objects
which may have failed in one function, only to find
an entirely new one - like the leaky wellington
boot now adapted into a perfect door wedge, or
the finger of fudge which stops the school bell
ringing.
It is the 'manners' of the street which absorb
Wentworth. Those manners are manifest in the
language it speaks, in the form of helpfully
scrawled signs - 'Press for long time', a
home-owner has written, encouragingly, by their
doorbell. It is in those final 'gestures of
politeness', which prevent someone dropping
their half-eaten sandwich on the ground, and
decide instead to tuck it in the craw of a tree. Or
the infectious behaviour that spreads in the
streets, when, for instance, one person's
discarded coke can, is joined by another and
another...
Wentworth, like Atget, rarely photographs
people, and yet his world is human, all the more
human, for being uninhabited. Whether in his
gentle anthropomorphism - a decrepit car, its
drooping bumper bandaged with carpet as if
wounded - or in his alertness to the practical, yet
curious decisions made when dealing with the
vicissitudes of life - like the hurried shopper who
abandons his dog in the street, chained, not to
the railings, but to his shoulder bag - Wentworth's
photographs make us look afresh at the cityspace
and the humanity it contains.
Kate Bush, Senior Programmer
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