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Rating: 
Summary: Violence towards trees
Review: "Except occasionally, ... the French have managed very well to sublimate the periodic human tendency to behave violently toward one's fellow men, and have directed these impulses toward their trees." (opposite a photo of a garden gate made from trained trees) Szarkowski is in top form once again!
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Summary: love as light
Review: Again, John Szarkowski takes us by the hand and leads us into the photographs of Eugene Atget, as through the magic of a looking glass. In these writings, on a selection of photographs from the first quarter of the 20th century, in his historically aware and individual way, Szarkowski instructs on how to read a photograph by doing so himself. We not only see into the environs of Paris through the eyes of the eclectic, determined and tender Atget, but also through the eyes and the keen, attentive mind of Szarkowski, who writes as though he lives inside these pictures, and tends them, and the photographer, with great devotion. This edition is set up by the previous 4 volume study, The Work of Atget, by Maria Morris Hambourg and John Szarkowski, Museum of Modern Art, 1985. But this new book comes from a persistent, deep seam miner, one who knows that what it is about these photographs is so fertile, they can be studied throughout one's life, and still give more. How rich is the mind that can bring another mind to light? Would it be bearable if everything in life could be keyed into focus, for us too busy and bothered to pay attention, by a poet as revelatory as Szarkowski? When considering entree des jardins, 1921-22, he says, "except occasionally, as (for example) during revolutions, the French have managed very well to sublimate the periodic human tendency to behave violently toward one's fellow human men, and have directed these impulses toward their trees", you cannot help but love the gardener who built the gate here, the photographer for seeing it, and Szarkowski, for bringing it to our attention in this way. He tells you what is on the menu, who lived in the house, how the hotel got its name, who built it, what may have motivated them to sculpt a Dionysus over a doorway, what member of the court of Louis the XIV was cast to live where, what other photographer may have attempted to photograph the same scene, and sometimes, what led Atget there. The book is a beautiful masterpiece, and an accomplishment worthy of a life spent looking deeply. If you love (really looking at) photographs, you should consider your shelves incomplete without it.
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Summary: Our Most Articulate Writer about Photographs
Review: ATGET is a beautiful book of 100 images faced by 100 one-page commentaries by John Szarkowski, plus his 8 page introduction. In other words, it has the same format as his LOOKING AT PHOTOGRAPHS. The reproductions are excellent. The commentaries are an intertaining mix of photographic history, insight into subject matter (basketmaking, tree pruning, automobiles), and analysis of the formal qualites that make the photographs classics. What we have here is a distillation of what the best photographic curator of the 20th Century has to say about one of the best photographers of the 20th Century.
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Summary: This is a delicious book
Review: John Szarkowski has chosen one hundred extraordinary photographs by Eugene Atget, to explore in a book entitled in a grand elegant serif typeface simplicity "ATGET". Turning pages in this book, is the beginning of a journey that describes over and over again, less is more. This is a delicious book. In these beautifully printed reproductions, Atget offers mocha cobblestones and cocoa dusted buildings rising out of lavender gray mist, moldy peach bark grows on his trees, cream lilies are carved out of the dark chocolate of a pond, silver pumpkin leaves glisten, putty sunlit mists of dust drift through an overstuffed room. Each photograph seems so simple and quiet at first glance, but don't be fooled. Look, and look again because they are teeming with spirits and secrets and the steps just taken off stage. Look for reflections in glass and mirrors and water, curtains pulled to one side, a pigeon toed mannequin, the cavernous, black block of an entrance to a side show. Each plate invites imagination with Szarkowski's insights and suggestions. Many of the images are of people who have just left, and the people who will arrive, and John Szarkowski's elegant prose allows the reader to dive into these square frames to float in a France of the early 1900's and wonder. Mr. Szarkowski offers wonderful chunks of history and parcels of context to embrace each image. Atget and Szarkowski are fine partners.
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Summary: *The* Atget book to get
Review: Now that it is so cheap, don't miss this great book! Excellent prose by Szarkowski and beautiful pictures by a master... hard combination to beat.
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Summary: Reviews and book do not correlate
Review: These reviews refer to the Museum of Modern Art Atget book- not the Paris in Detail book. Click under "all editions" to see the MOMA book. Amazon has to rectify this. I think the MOMA book deserves 5 stars. I have not seen the Paris in Detail book. I put one star because Amazon requires something in the blank, and I thought it might draw attention to this.
Rating:
Summary: Reviews and book do not correlate
Review: These reviews refer to the Museum of Modern Art Atget book- not the Paris in Detail book. Click under "all editions" to see the MOMA book. Amazon has to rectify this. I think the MOMA book deserves 5 stars. I have not seen the Paris in Detail book. I put one star because Amazon requires something in the blank, and I thought it might draw attention to this.
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Summary: "Being Eugene Atget"
Review: This book is another gift from a great writer and observer, an homage to Atget, to photography, to art and to Western civilization. For anyone who pretends to be a photographer or to love Art, it is a joy to share Szarkowski's easy erudition, one or two pages at a time.
Atget showed us the axioms of photography and axioms cannot be explained by analysis. The test of an Atget, Bach, or Cezanne, is that it is impossible to find the source of their revelation and impossible not to find their influence in future artists. "Good pictures are not explained by words...With exceptional good luck criticism might with words construct meanings that are different from but consonant with the meanings of pictures. Such constructs of words might possibly guide us toward the neighborhoods where pictorial meanings live.", he says in this book. (Please, if you are an art historian or critic, take this pledge!) Thus Szarkowski tours the photographs he has selected and writes a thought or two somehow connected to each one - sometimes a revelation, often a question. Each page of writing stands alone and will engage the reader in a conversation with the author and the photographer. Many times Szarkowski puts us somewhere behind the camera a hundred years ago, or on a bridge in Paris 600 years ago. He really brings Atget to life by putting us in his time and place. There are plenty of revealing facts stashed throughout the writing. Szarkowski talks of the influence of Atget on Weston, Walker Evans, Winogrand, and others and leaves us to recognize the Atget in Cartier-Bresson, Dorothea Lange, and ourselves. He mentions just the relevant technical and biographical details. He shows examples of how Atget handled Time,the essence of photography. As he wrote in "Photography Until Now" about Atget, "Perhaps from the practice of looking attentively and repeatedly at the same thing from different vantage points and in different lights he came to see that ...one tree, or one reflecting pool, was never twice the same, and would therefore last as a subject as long as one's concentrated attention. With this realization he became, surely not intentionally, a modern artist." The reflecting pools and trees are in this book along with the more familiar Parisian architecture. Different views of the same subjects are also in other books such as Berenice Abbott's "The World Of Atget". Szarkowski thus, enriches the literature on Atget, giving meaning to many of the published mindless catalogs of his photographs. Szarkowski shows another reason Atget is a modern artist. His work is meticulously constructed in the same cultural elements as the works of his more famous contemporary French painters and sculptures. There are no accidents and no mistakes in his work. The result is a richness that reveals something new every time we look at it. The same is true of this book by Szarkowsi. I've read it three times. It is a masterpiece, "...seductively and deceptively simple, wholly poised, reticent, dense with experience, mysterious and true." To use the words Szarkowski wrote of Atget in Looking At Photographs.
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Summary: A Classic...buy it while it lasts
Review: This book works perfectly on so many levels. A great selection of photographs, beautiful reproductions, great design, and complementing the photographs, some of the best writing about the work that I have read. Mr Szarkowski communicates a sense of wonder, mixed with curiosity, about these works, but the overall tone is almost elegaic. Studying these photographs with attention to the details unfolded has brought out the best in the writer....the prose seems ready to vanish into time in the same way the subjects of these photos have, leaving wistfulness and a sense of melancholy. Mr Szarkowski's method of writing about or around each of the reproductions is quite unique in my experience, and there is a beautiful symbiosis...the word and the picture, each seemingly commenting on each other. Bottom line:this book is an essential soon-to-be classic. Buy it before it disappears into the mists of time.
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