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In 1925, the young American college drop-out Berenice Abbott was in Paris, learning her craft as a photographer working as a darkroom assistant and frequent model for the American artist Man Ray at his studio at 31 bis rue Campagne-Première, in Montparnasse. It was in Man Ray’s studio that Abbott first saw the photographs of the little-known Eugène Atget, proprietor and creator of a commercial photographic archive documenting a disappearing Paris, and Man Ray’s near neighbor on rue Campagne-Première. Moving to her own studio in 1926, Abbott continued to meet and discuss photography with the elderly and usually reticent Atget, even persuading him to sit for a series of portraits in 1927, shortly before he died. This is how Abbott––so clearly invested in the systematic scope of Atget’s project, rather than seeing it like Man Ray as a form of naive and unconscious Surrealism––came to acquire almost half of Atget’s surviving prints and negatives following his death, effectively saving his record of “Old Paris” from obscurity and loss.

In 1929, Abbott returned to New York, taking with her more than fourteen hundred glass negatives and nearly 8,000 vintage prints. Determined to promote Atget’s work to an American audience, Abbott made modern prints from Atget’s plates, exhibiting them where she could and, in 1930, publishing Atget, Photographe de Paris (New York: E. Weyhe), the first survey of his photographic work and the beginning of his posthumous fame. The print we have therefore marks the intersection of two photographic careers: that of Abbott who, in 1935, would begin her own documentary project on “Changing New York;” and that of Atget who, by the time of his death, had methodically assembled and catalogued thirteen separate series of photographs documenting “Old Paris,” its environs, streets, architecture, parks, interiors, religious arts, and rapidly vanishing street trades, or petits métiers. It is to this latter series that the “Organ-grinder” belongs, alongside the knife-sharpener, the bread-boy, the fishwife, the pot seller, and the lampshade peddler, all posed with the attributes of their trade as models and types. But here, while the squarely framed organ-grinder stares grimly into the camera, the sheer ebullient joy of the child breaches the frame and breaks the mold, filling the street with raucous music and making this one of Atget’s most evocative images of street life in turn-of-the-century Montparnasse.

John Tagg, SUNY Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Art History

*Select photographs from Atget, Photographe de Paris can be viewed on the screen nearby.

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