PARIS CHANGING

PARIS CHANGING
Christopher Rauschenberg
PARIS CHANGING
Revisiting Eugne Atgets Paris
Princeton Architectural Press, New York
With essays by Clark Worswick, Alison Nordstrom, and
Rosamond Bernier
Published by
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New York, New York 10003
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2007 Princeton Architectural Press
All rights reserved
Printed and bound in China
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No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without
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Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright.
Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions.
All photographs by Christopher Rauschenberg unless otherwise noted.
Courtesy the Bibliothque nationale de France: front cover (bottom left),
pages 8 (top and bottom left), 20, 24, 26, 28, 30, 34, 36, 42, 44, 48, 50, 52, 54, 56,
58, 60, 66, 70, 80, 90, 92, 94, 104, 108, 112, 118, 120, 126, 138, 148, 150, 152, 154,
156, 158, 160, 162, 164, 166, 168, 170, 172, 174, 176
Courtesy the Parisienne de Photographie: front cover (top left), back cover
(left), pages 22, 32, 38, 40, 46, 62, 64, 68, 72, 74, 76, 82, 84, 86, 88, 96, 98, 100,
102, 106, 110, 114, 116, 122, 124, 128, 130, 132, 136, 140, 142, 144
Editing: Nicola Bednarek
Design: Jan Haux
Maps: Matt Knutzen
Special thanks to: Nettie Aljian, Sara Bader, Dorothy Ball, Janet Behning,
Becca Casbon, Penny (Yuen Pik) Chu, Russell Fernandez, Peter Fitzpatrick,
Wendy Fuller, Clare Jacobson, John King, Nancy Eklund Later, Linda Lee,
Katharine Myers, Lauren Nelson Packard, Jennifer Thompson, Arnoud
Verhaeghe, Paul Wagner, Joseph Weston, and Deb Wood of Princeton
Architectural Press Kevin C. Lippert, publisher
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rauschenberg, Christopher, 1951
Paris changing : revisiting Eugene Atgets Paris / Christopher
Rauschenberg ; with essays by Clark Worswick, Alison Nordstrom, and
Rosamond Bernier.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-1-56898-680-7 (alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 1-56898-680-7 (alk. paper)
1. Photography, Artistic. 2. Paris (France)Pictorial works.
3. Rauschenberg, Christopher, 1951 4. Atget, Eugne, 18571927. I. Atget,
Eugne, 18571927. II. Worswick, Clark. III. Nordstrm, Alison Devine. IV.
Bernier, Rosamond. V. Title.
TR654.R3386 2007
779.944361dc22
2007005569
Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
Revisiting Eugne Atgets Paris
Clark Worswick
Reconsidering Atget
Alison Nordstrom
Plates
Arrondissements 1, 2, 3 & 4
Arrondissements 5, 6 & 14
Arrondissements 18, 19 & 20
Saint-Cloud, Versailles, Sceaux
Paris Regained
Rosamond Bernier
In Atgets Shoes
Christopher Rauschenberg
7
9
10

14


18
78
134
146
179

182

Acknowledgments

First of all, I would like to thank my mother, Susan Weil Kirschenbaum, who taught me
photography and taught me to love Atget. I would also like to thank my agent Robert Morton
for believing in the idea; Alison Devine Nordstrom for making a dream come true exhibi-
tion of this project at the George Eastman House; Franoise Reynaud of the Muse Carnavalet
for helping me to fnd the reproduction prints used in this book; and Mark Klett, Ellen
Manchester, and JoAnn Verburg for inspiring rephotographers everywhere. The Bibliothque
nationale de France and the Photothque des muses de la Ville de Paris kindly granted
permission to reproduce the photos by Atget contained in this book.
7
8
Preface
Christopher Rauschenberg
Eugne Atget photographed Paris from 1888 until his death in 1927. Like many people, I con-
sider him the greatest photographer of all time. He documented the city in a straightforward
way, his images evoking the feeling that all the transitory things that people make, all the
things they do, are washed away, leaving only their transcendent evidence.
I have known Atgets works from my earliest days as a photographer, seeking them
out in books and museum shows whenever possible. On a trip to Paris in 1989, I suddenly
found myself face to face with a spiral-topped gatepost that I knew very well from a photo-
graph by Atget (opposite, top left). I rephotographed his gatepost from memory (opposite, top
right) and wondered how many other Atget subjects might still be holding their poses. When
I found a familiar-looking stone stairway in another neighborhood, I looked around for the
huge, beautiful tree that in Atgets photograph (opposite, bottom left) loomed over a fower
vase on a corner post, but I could not fnd it. The fower vase on the other side of the stairs,
however, did have a tree behind it, so I photographed that side instead (opposite, bottom
right). I wanted to match the poetic meaning of the image more than I wanted to show that
the magnifcent tree was gone.
In Paris that year, in the streets and places that Atget had admired, I resolved to return
and explore with my camera whether the haunting and beautiful city of his vision still existed.
Between 1997 and 1998, I made three trips to Paris and rephotographed fve hundred of the
outdoor scenes that Atget had photographed. (I could not, of course, revisit the interiors that he
had pictured or recapture the people in his views.)
In this book seventy-fve of the pairs of images are published, clearly showing that
the Paris of Atgets vision still exists and is available to eyes that look for it. In central Paris, in
particular, most of the places that Atget photographed are still there, and still posing. You can
see the effects of weathering and acid rain on them; you can see the disrespectful marks of graf-
fti; and most of all, you can see that the magical streets of the city are choked with traffc and
parked cars. However, among all the other Parises that coexist so thickly in one amazing me-
tropolis, Atgets Paris is still defnitely and hauntingly there.
9
10

Clark Worswick
Practically no artist I know of has left the world with what is commonly received as the
seminal vision of an epoch. Yet, just such a vision was left by perhaps Frances greatest
photographer of the twentieth century, Eugne Atget. His documentation of Paris between
the years 1897 and 1927 defned not only a city but an entire eraFrances belle epoch.
Born in 1857, Atget was, by unlikely turns, frst a cabin boy and then a sailor on the French
Transatlantic runs. He later became a provincial actor and, fnally, a photographer. The
curiosity of his great accomplishment is that during the frst part of the twentieth century, so
neglected and modest was his work, so lonely was his obsessive grand passion for the
documentation of Paris that the artist virtually starved to death. When he died in 1927, Atget
had been utterly forgotten by his contemporaries except for a few of his closest friends.
Today, eighty years after his death, we realize how this humble street photographer
changed the way we look at both modernism and art. Aside from the manifest debts that
modernism owes him, Atget left us with a vision of the world he inhabited that is both
particular and unique. But despite his monumental uvre we know very little about Atget
and his motivations for undertaking his lifes work.
Atget was born in the southwest region of Gironde in Libourne in 1857. Orphaned
at the age of seven, he was raised by his uncle, who was a stationmaster in the department
of railways. Making a living frst as a cabin boy and as a sailor, he later became a member
of a provincial theatrical repertory company and fnally settled in Paris sometime in the
mid-1890s, where he purchased his frst camera in 1897. It was made of walnut and had a
rapid rectilinear lens that captured images on 18-by-24-cm photosensitized glass plates.
The impetus that appears to have sparked Atgets interest in photography was a historical
commission from the municipality of Paris to document the sections of old Paris, though
how he got this commission is unknown. This work marks the beginning of his career as a
photographer, but even though innumerable historians have studied Atget and his work, we
know nothing about why he chose this profession. A closer examination of his work habits
and life is a slow processlike peeling back an onion layer by layerand at the end one is
left with nothing so much as mysteries of the human heart. We know only the barest facts
of how Atget came to defne his subtractive, objectivist vision. And we know even less about
what impelled him to produce the great work that came to consume the last three decades
of his life.
Revisiting Eugne Atgets Paris
11
In undertaking his documentation of Paris, Atget followed in the well-trodden
footsteps of a number of other French photographers whom he had perhaps never heard of.
Chief amongst them were Charles Ngre, Edouard Baldus, and Gustave LeGray. Charles
Marville, who also began working in the 1850s, produced a suite of photographs of Paris in
connection with Baron Haussmanns renovation of the city in the 1860s, which radically
changed its physical look. During the same decade, the Bisson brothers also made important
photographic documents of Paris and its buildings.
Though images of European urban buildings and cityscapes were much in vogue
during the 1850s through the 1890sthe works of J. Craig Annan in Glasgow, Dixon & Boole
in London, and Robert MacPherson, James Anderson, and Fratelli Alinari in Italy come to
mindby the time Atget took up photographing Paris between 1897 and 1899, the docu-
mentation of European urban subjects by commercial photographers was drawing to a close.
During the later part of the 1890s, an era that increasingly came to be dominated by amateurs
wielding Kodak cameras, the world-wide demand for commercial photography of urban
scenes went into a steep and radical decline. Somehow, however, by some fuke of a
problematic spirit, Atgets career as a documentarian of Paris fourished at that exact moment.
After his 1897 work for the commission to document historic Paris, Atget managed to
sell pictures in 1899 to the Muse Carnavalet, a museum devoted to the history of Paris. Having
formed a connection with this established museum, in the next decades he would sell his pho-
tographs to a range of institutions, among them the Bibliothque Historique de la Ville de Paris,
the Bibliothque National, the Bibliothque de lEcole des Beaux-Arts, the Ecole Boulle, the
Bibliothque du Muse de Sculpture Decoratifs, and the Muse du Sculpture. Early in his career
Atget also worked on photographs that he called documents pour artistes, which were bought
and used as pictorial motifs by the painters Maurice Utrillo, Andr Dunoyer de Segonzac,
Georges Braque, Andr Derain, and Maurice de Vlaminck, as well as Man Ray during the
1920s. These images certainly contributed to and shaped Atgets vision of the documentary.
His most important uvre, though, would occupy the photographer for thirty years.
Between 1897 and 1927, capturing the life and scenes of Paris with his modest plate camera
and tripod became something like Atgets private work, which he pursued daily on his
solitary rounds around the city. It became Atgets grand and impossible mission to preserve
everything in Paris that was evanescent and vanishing from the ancien rgime: the architec-
turethe citys great public buildings, churches, residences, restaurants, and storesits
people and their trades, as well as its vehicles. He often documented empty streets bereft of
inhabitants at dawn and dusk. Sometimes I think of Atget as a kind of grand, agitated botanist
dividing an entire city into phylum and sub-phylum where each species is categorized,
named, and described. Atgets patience was almost glacialI know of no other photographer
12
among his contemporaries who embarked upon such a vast project of a single place. He even
took pictures of the root structure of trees and the foliage of Paris at different seasons. Nothing
escaped his eye.
Although Atget sold his photographs, he received very little for them. Still, he
managed to continue his project and thus was free from the usual constraints that come with
a commercial photographers clientele. In his work, he traveled into realms that no photogra-
pher had ever traversed. On his fragile glass plates, with his old-fashioned plate camera,
Atget photographed the streets and shops of Montmartre and the Quartier Latin; he photo-
graphed shop window displays, bourgeois interiors, merry-go-rounds, and the gardens of the
city as well as Versailles, St. Cloud, and Fontainebleu. He took thousands of photographs
of buildings that lined the streets of Paris and their embellished facades. He paid particular
attention to the decorations of Parisian architecture in the form of door knockers, shop signs,
ornately carved doorways, grills, elaborately worked glass windows, staircases, stucco
ornamentations, and courtyards. Over time, his passion for documenting came to encompass
the entire city.
During his working life as a photographer, Atget had a diverse clientele, ranging
from set designers, artists, and antiquarians, to the building industry, publishers, and academ-
ics. Today, books published with his photographs have appeared in almost countless
numbers in literally scores of languages, and it has become commonplace to reference the
city of Paris and Atgets documentation of it in the same sentence. His work has come to sym-
bolize both objectivism in modern art and the look of Frances belle epoch. This vision of
Pariss recent past is not only populated by many of Frances greatest architectural treasures
but alsothough they are not shown in this bookby a vast gallery of Parisian human
types ranging from street singers to gypsies, basket sellers, peasants harvesting their crops,
rag pickers, prostitutes, and Parisian street pavers.
The photographic historian Molly Nesbit has laboriously counted the number of
prints that Atget sold to the different organs of the French statesome 16,758 prints are held
by various French institutions. Nevertheless, at the time of his death Atget was so forgotten
that not a single volume of his work had appeared since he had self-published the portfolio
LArt dans le Vieux Paris in 1909. In 1927, after Atgets death, his executor Andr Calmette
sold for an unrecorded amount some 8,000 prints and 1,400 negatives to the young American
photographer Berenice Abbott, who apparently was the one person in the world still inter-
ested in Atgets lifes work. For the next forty years Abbott spent much of her time making the
world aware of Atgets great achievement. In a saga that is almost breathtaking in its dedication
receiving few rewards and mostly indifferenceAbbott arranged exhibitions of Atgets
photographs, encouraged the publication of books about his work, and in her darkroom
13
painstakingly continued to reproduce the forgotten photographers images. One of the best
technicians of her generation, she made carefully crafted prints of her own selection of Atgets
negatives on heavily impregnated silver-coated photographic papers. But not only was Abbott
unfailing in her efforts to make Atgets work known to the world, she was also inspired by
him to undertake her own documentation of a citythat of Depression-era New York.
Finally, in the late 1960s, the Museum of Modern Art in New York approached Abbott
to buy her collection of Atgets works. In order to be able to afford printing Atgets negatives
and mount exhibitions of his work, Abbott had, during the early years of the Depression,
entered into a fnancial transaction with the gallery owner Julien Levy for what amounted to a
half interest in her collection. For her share of Atgets prints and negatives that she had saved
from oblivion she received from the Museum of Modern Art $25,000, a little more than $3 a
print. Today, the prices for select individual photographs later deaccessioned by the museum
are nearing the sixty thousand dollar mark. Talking about the pictures Atget sold during his
lifetime, Abbott once remarked: The price of his photographs was indicative of the value
placed on photographs by this French clientele. Masterpieces of photography sold for pennies.
The prices ranged from .25 to 1.25 francs in 1911. A terrible irony connects these two
artiststhey received virtually no fnancial rewards for their work during their lifetime, yet
artistic immortality has touched them both.
I think it was Abbott who best defned Atgets great achievement. She described
Goethes fascination with the pinnacle of artistic accomplishment as an imagination for
reality. This is perhaps the only description that does justice to Atgets visionhe had an
imagination for reality.
It is utterly impossible for the modern viewer to look at Atgets Paris without
feeling nostalgic for what we have lost. The new city of Paris that now encircles the landscape
of Atgets pictures is often an exercise in soulless scale with fat, vertical concrete planes
and easily aged glass walls that leak. It is a world of temporary workmanship. Todays Paris,
like most cities in the world, suffers from architectural blight and a mirror-like samenesslike
international airports set in the landscape of nowhere. In the gigantism of a machine-produced
world, what we have lost is a human scale in our cities.
In Atgets images we can marvel at Paris, frozen forever at the moment of la belle
epoch. In his remarkable rephotography project Christopher Rauschenbergs absolute passion
for the work of Atget is clear. With unfailing patience and meticulous craftsmanship he has
rediscovered the world of Atgets ancien rgime. His accomplishment is almost archaeological
in its intent. Moving a few trash baskets aside and waiting for cars to leave, he shows us in his
images that Atgets Paris is in front of us still. Rauschenbergs photographs document the
unique beauty of this great city, its heart still pulsing underneath the layers of indifferent con-
temporary architecture.
14
Reconsidering Atget
Alison Nordstrom
Rephotography is a practice inherent in the nature of its medium. The cameras almost
magical ability to freeze and isolate time and space manifests the specifcity of moments and
particular places. As we cannot in real life, we hold these visions in our hands and at our
leisure. The photograph permits detailed observation, contemplation, and comparison: we
can know the subjects it traces and transforms. This knowledge, and the way it shapes
our ongoing looking, has moved innumerable photographers to capture subsequent parallel
moments, sometimes in an attempt to replicate, sometimes to document change, and
sometimes to celebrate, better understand, and appreciate other, earlier eyes.
Eugne Atget and Christopher Rauschenberg were born nearly one hundred years
apart, in 1857 and 1951 respectively. The nineteenth-century man came to Paris as it rushed
precipitously from its lingering trace of the ancient to take its place as a modern European
capital. His photographs were deliberate attempts to preserve the old before its apparently
inevitable disappearance; his venerable faces, rude cobbles, and mysterious doors and
stairways take on particular poignancy. The occasional fashes of elongated blurred light in
his imagesin actuality a subject in motion too fast for accurate capture by Atgets slow
shutterfeel like brash harbingers of the future intruding on the brooking silence of the past.
In contrast, Rauschenberg came to Paris seeking to identify and preserve, not only some
vision of premodern Paris, but the very premodern Paris that Atget himself had established
and created photographically, with all its emotional qualities.
The varied practices of rephotography defy precise defnition, though we understand
that more elements are involved than a simple re-rendering of something photographed
before. Thus, the ubiquitous images of the Egyptian pyramids, though popular to this day,
should not usually be understood as a reference to the Zangaki Brothers or Francis Frith.
They are simply an ongoing manifestation of a persistent visual icon and marker of place. It is
unlikely that later photographers of Egypt, whether amateur or professional, studied the
works of their forebears with the intention of commenting on them. Though making pictures
of what has already been photographically portrayed has been common since the process
was invented, intentional rephotographic projects are tellingly recent innovations. Their
prevalence today points to the emergence of a full-fedged history of photography, the desire
of artists to situate their work within the context of that history, and, perhaps, the ascendance
of the notion that photographs work best as conceptual projects.
15
While Milton Rogovins depiction of families in Buffalo, New York and Nicholas
Nixons ongoing thirty-year study of his wife and her sisters, remind us that the subjects of
these temporal taxonomies may be human, and painfully mortal at that, recent
rephotographic projects are most commonly associated with place. Many of the best known of
these are feats of technical precisions and historical explication. Douglas Levere, for example,
began a project in 1977 that replicated Berenice Abbotts 1939 survey, Changing New York.
Levere revisited Abbotts original sites at the exact times of day and year that the original
photographs were captured, strictly replicating Abbotts camera angles and depth of feld. In
his search for veracity, he even employed the very camera Abbott had used. The result was
more than one hundred pairs of then and now images that stand as a record of architectural
and technological change, and encourage meticulous back-and-forth comparisons of the
visual information they contain. A single photograph gives the illusion that time stops. A
rephotograph lifts that illusion, asserts Levere. In this tangle of old and new. . . lies the truth
that Berenice Abbott understood well. . . . Change is the only permanence.
Such fux is also the emphasis of Matthew Buckinghams 2005 study One Side of
Broadway, an homage to Rudolph De Leeuws 1910 survey Both Sides of Broadway, which
documented every building on that famed New York City thoroughfare between Bowling
Green and Columbus Circle. Presented as a slide installation, Buckinghams visual index
is also a vehicle for the presentation of historical factoids, as a voice-over notes the events and
activities that occurred in the buildings, with emphasis on early photographic studios
and cinemas. In a similar venture, Omar Khans pioneering 1995 experiment in multimedia,
Through a Magic Lantern: Jacksons India, 1895, uses interactive digital technologies to meld
William Henry Jacksons photochromes and lantern slides of a thousand-mile rail journey
through South Asia with Khans own replication of them made one hundred years later.
Perhaps the most well-known and complex rephotographic surveys undertaken in
the last decades are the Second View and Third View projects led by Mark Klett in the
1970s and again in the late 1990s. These projects were based on the western geological survey
images of William Bell, John K. Hilliers, William Henry Jackson, and Timothy OSullivan,
which had been made immediately after the Civil War, and were, in most cases, the earliest
images ever taken of that part of the world. In both Second View and Third View, Klett and
his teams made multiple images at the site of each historical photograph with an eye to
precise imitation. Vantage points, weather conditions, lighting, and seasons were replicated as
exactly as possible. The original photographs stand as a baseline against which subsequent
change can be visualized and evaluated. The second views, made more than a century later,
dramatize this change; but, signifcantly, the third views, made in most cases only twenty
years after the second, reveal the most dramatic transformations.
16
Most of the rephotographic projects considered here call attention to change, but
Rauschenbergs treatment of Atgets Paris demonstrates that rephotography can also reveal
the persistence and consistency of certain visual themes. Rauschenberg has chosen not to
replicate Atgets equipment, stance, or time of day. Rather, his images are a reference to the
distinctive mood and characteristics of the earlier photographs. In some, it is a familiar and
singular object, such as a dress-shaped hanging sign, that marks a site as reminiscent of Atget.
In others, it is an almost ineffable emotional nuance that evokes the already-seen in similar
doorways and staircases to those Atget knew.
The invention of the camera has changed not only how and what we see, but how
and what we remember. Rauschenberg was seventeen when he frst saw Paris, but he was
already a photographer and already familiar with Atgets work. In creating this homage to his
distinguished predecessor, he has given us both another frozen moment in the fux of a vital
city and a comment on the photographs as history and art.
Plates

18
Arrondissements 1, 2, 3 & 4
The Abduction of Djanire, by Marqueste, jardin des Tuileries (pp. 2021)
Jardin des Tuileries (pp. 2223)
Jardin des Tuileries (pp. 2425)
Au Bon Jardinier, quai de la Mgisserie/La Passion du Jardin, quai de la Mgisserie (pp. 2627)
Maison du Sphinx, 31 rue Saint-Denis (pp. 2829)
Intersection of rue de la Grande-Truanderie and rue Pierre-Lescot (pp. 3031)
Saint-Eustache Church and rue du Jour (pp.3233)
Former home of the choir school of Saint-Eustache Church, 25 rue du Jour (pp. 3435)
Htel des abbs de Royaumont, 4 rue du Jour (pp. 3637)
Fontaine de lArbre-Sec (pp. 3839)
Door, 6 rue Saint-Florentin (pp. 4041)
Jardin du Palais-Royal (pp. 4243)
Place Sainte-Opportune (pp. 4445)
Galerie Colbert, rue Vivienne (pp. 4647)
Corner of passage Basfour, 176 rue Saint-Denis (pp. 4849)
Corner of rue Saint-Spire and rue Sainte-Foy (pp. 5051)
House where Andr Chnier lived in 1793, 97 rue de Clry (pp. 5253)
Old house and old boutique, 3 rue Volta/Old house, 3 rue Volta (pp. 5455)
Rue Dupetit-Thouars (pp. 5657)
Rue de la Normandie (pp. 5859)
46 rue des Archives (pp. 6061)
Fontaine des Haudriettes, rue des Haudriettes (pp. 6263)
Maison de Nicolas Flamel, 51 rue Montmorency (pp. 6465)
Rue Saint-Bon (pp. 6667)
Htel des Ambassadeurs de Hollande, 47 rue Vieille-du-Temple (pp. 68-69)
13 rue Franois-Miron (pp. 7071)
Caf, 62 rue de lHtel-de-Ville (pp. 7273)
Rue des Nonnains-dHyres/Rue de Fourcy (pp. 7475)
Rue des Ursins (pp. 7677)
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D
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L
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R
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T
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E
N
N
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B
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V
A
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D

B
E
A
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A
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C
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E
P
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S
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L
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D
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B
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A
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D

D
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S
E
B
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T
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R
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A
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BOULEVARD DE LA
M
ADELEINE
BOULEVARD HAUSSM
ANN
B
O
U
L
E
V
A
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D

B
O
U
R
D
O
N
V
O
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M
A
Z
A
S
A
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N
U
E
D
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C
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P
S
-E
LY
S
E
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S
V
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E
O
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G
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S
P
O
M
P
ID
O
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Q
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C
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I
10
12
13
17
16
15
18
19
14
21
22
25
24
23
26
28
27
29
2 1 3
4
5
6
7
8
20
9
11
The Abduction of Djanire, by Marqueste, jardin des Tuileries, 190708
20
The Abduction of Djanire, by Marqueste, jardin des Tuileries, 1998
21
22
Jardin des Tuileries, 1907
23
Jardin des Tuileries, 1998
24
Jardin des Tuileries, 1907
25
Jardin des Tuileries, 1998
26
Au Bon Jardinier, quai de la Mgisserie, 1902
27
La Passion du Jardin, quai de la Mgisserie, 1997
28
Maison du Sphinx, 31 rue Saint-Denis, 1907
29
31 rue Saint-Denis, 1997
30
Intersection of rue de la Grande-Truanderie and rue Pierre-Lescot, 1907
31
Intersection of rue de la Grande-Truanderie and rue Pierre-Lescot, 1998
32
Saint-Eustache Church and rue du Jour, 1902
33
Saint-Eustache Church and rue du Jour, 1997
34
Former home of the choir school of Saint-Eustache Church, 25 rue du Jour, 1902
35
Former home of the choir school of Saint-Eustache Church, 25 rue du Jour, 1998
36
Htel des abbs de Royaumont, 4 rue du Jour, 1907
37
Htel des abbs de Royaumont, 4 rue du Jour, 1997
38
Fontaine de lArbre-Sec, 1899
39
Fontaine de lArbre-Sec, 1997
40
Door, 6 rue Saint-Florentin, 1912
41
Door, 6 rue Saint-Florentin, 1998
42
Jardin du Palais-Royal, 1905
43
Jardin du Palais-Royal, 1998
44
Place Sainte-Opportune, 1907
45
Place Sainte-Opportune, 1997
46
Galerie Colbert, rue Vivienne, 1906
47
Galerie Colbert, rue Vivienne, 1997
48
Corner of passage Basfour, 176 rue Saint-Denis, 1907
49
Corner of passage Basfour, 176 rue Saint-Denis, 1998
50
Corner of rue Saint-Spire and rue Sainte-Foy, about to be demolished for the extension of rue Dussoubs, 1907
51
Corner of rue Saint-Spire and rue Sainte-Foy, 1998
52
House where Andr Chnier lived in 1793, 97 rue de Clry, 1907
53
House where Andr Chnier lived in 1793, 97 rue de Clry, 1997
54
Old house and old boutique, 3 rue Volta, 1901
55
Old house, 3 rue Volta, 1998
56
Rue Dupetit-Thouars, 1911
57
Rue Dupetit-Thouars, 1998
58
Rue de la Normandie, 1901
59
Rue de la Normandie, 1998
60
46 rue des Archives, 1901
61
46 rue des Archives, 1997
62
Fontaine des Haudriettes, rue des Haudriettes, 1898
63
Fontaine des Haudriettes, rue des Haudriettes, 1997
64
Maison de Nicolas Flamel, 51 rue Montmorency, 1902
65
Maison de Nicolas Flamel, 51 rue Montmorency, 1998
66
Rue Saint-Bon, 1903
67
Rue Saint-Bon, 1998
68
Htel des Ambassadeurs de Hollande, 47 rue Vieille-du-Temple, 1898
69
Htel des Ambassadeurs de Hollande, 47 rue Vieille-du-Temple, 1997
70
13 rue Franois-Miron, 1902
71
13 rue Franois-Miron, 1998
72
Caf, 62 rue de lHtel-de-Ville, 1903
73
Caf, 62 rue de lHtel-de-Ville, 1997
Rue des Nonnains-dHyres, 1900
74
Rue de Fourcy, 1998
75
76
Rue des Ursins, 1900
77
Rue des Ursins, 1998
Arrondissements 5, 6 & 14
Rue de Bivre (pp. 8081)
Fontaine Cuvier at the corner of rue Linn (pp. 8283)
Intersection of rue Lhomond and rue Rataud (pp. 8485)
The church of Saint-tienne-du-Mont (pp. 8687)
Intersection of rue Laplace and rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Genevive (pp. 8889)
Rue de la Bcherie (pp. 9091)
Rue Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre (pp. 9293)
Rue Galande (pp. 9495)
Cluny (pp. 9697)
Jardin du muse de Cluny, rue de Sommerard (pp. 9899)
Rue des Prtres-Saint-Sverin (pp. 100101)
The Seine and Pont-Neuf (pp. 1023)
5 rue Hautefeuille, Htel de Fcamp (pp. 1045)
Htel de la Salamandre, 20 rue de lHirondelle (pp. 1067)
Cour de Rohan (pp. 1089)
Former Saint-Cme Amphitheater, 5 rue de lcole-de-Mdecine (pp. 11011)
Maison de Prince de Cond, 4 rue Monsieur-le-Prince (pp. 11213)
Jardin du Luxembourg (pp. 11415)
Jardin du Luxembourg (pp. 11617)
Jardin du Luxembourg (pp. 11819)
Saint-Sulpice Church, rue Saint-Sulpice (pp. 12021)
Saint-Sulpice Church (pp. 12223)
2 rue de lAbbaye, at the intersection of rue Cardinal (pp. 12425)
38 rue de Seine (pp. 12627)
Intersection of rue de Seine and rue de lchaud (pp. 12829)
Place Denfort-Rochereau (pp. 13031)
Cour de lhospice de la Maternit (pp. 13233)
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
R
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R. DE LABBAYE
RUE DE FOUR
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N
A
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S
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B
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A
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A
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B
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A
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S
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B
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A
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B
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AVENUE REILLE
B
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LEV
A
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P
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H
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IQ
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A
V
E
N
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C
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B
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V
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S
A
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T
-M
A
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C
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L
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
46
45
44
43
42
41
47 48 49
50 51
52
53
54
56
55
30
80
Rue de Bivre, 1924
81
Rue de Bivre, 1998
Fontaine Cuvier at the corner of rue Linn, 1899
82
Fontaine Cuvier at the corner of rue Linn, 1998
83
84
Intersection of rue Lhomond and rue Rataud, 1913
85
Intersection of rue Lhomond and rue Rataud, 1997
86
The church of Saint-tienne-du-Mont, with the Panthon in the background, 1898
87
The church of Saint-tienne-du-Mont, with the Panthon in the background, 1997
88
Intersection of rue Laplace and rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Genevive, 1898
89
Intersection of rue Laplace and rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Genevive, 1998
90
Rue de la Bcherie, circa 1900
91
Rue de la Bcherie, 1998
Rue Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, 1898
92
Rue Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, 1997
93
94
Rue Galande, 1899
95
Rue Galande, 1998
96
Cluny (door), 1902
97
Cluny (door), 1998
98
Jardin du muse de Cluny, rue de Sommerard, 1907
99
Jardin du muse de Cluny, rue de Sommerard, 1997
100
Rue des Prtres-Saint-Sverin, 1903
101
Rue des Prtres-Saint-Sverin, 1998
102
The Seine and Pont-Neuf, 190203
103
The Seine and Pont-Neuf, 1998
104
5 Rue Hautefeuille, Htel de Fcamp, 1898
105
5 Rue Hautefeuille, Htel de Fcamp, 1997
106
Htel de la Salamandre, 20 rue de lHirondelle, 1900
107
Htel de la Salamandre, 20 rue de lHirondelle, 1998
108
Cour de Rohan, 1915
109
Cour de Rohan, 1998
110
Former Saint-Cme Amphitheater, 5 rue de lcole-de-Mdecine, 1898
111
Former Saint-Cme Amphitheater, 5 rue de lcole-de-Mdecine, 1997
112
Maison de Prince de Cond, 4 rue Monsieur-le-Prince, 18991900
113
Maison de Prince de Cond, 4 rue Monsieur-le-Prince, 1998
114
Jardin du Luxembourg, 1906
115
Jardin du Luxembourg, 1998
116
Jardin du Luxembourg, 190203
117
Jardin du Luxembourg, 1998
118
Jardin du Luxembourg, 1906
119
Jardin du Luxembourg, 1997
120
Side door of Saint-Sulpice Church, rue Saint-Sulpice, 1907
121
Side door of Saint-Sulpice Church, rue Saint-Sulpice, 1998
122
Holy water font given to Franois I by the Republic of Venice, Saint-Sulpice Church, 1907
123
Holy water font given to Franois I by the Republic of Venice, Saint-Sulpice Church, 1998
124
2 rue de lAbbaye, at the intersection of rue Cardinal, 190708
125
2 rue de lAbbaye, at the intersection of rue Cardinal, 1997
126
Fry stand, 38 rue de Seine, 1910
127
38 rue de Seine, 1998
128
Intersection of rue de Seine and rue de lchaud, circa 1924
129
Intersection of rue de Seine and rue de lchaud, 1997
130
Advertising column, place Denfort-Rochereau, 1900
131
Advertising column, place Denfort-Rochereau, 1997
132
Cour de lhospice de la Maternit, 1899
133
Cour de lhospice de la Maternit, 1997
Arrondissements 18, 19 & 20
Sacr-Coeur, seen from rue Norvins (pp. 13637)
Le Moulin de la Galette, rue Lepic (pp. 13839)
Place du Tertre (pp. 14041)
Place du Tertre (pp. 14243)
47 rue des Cascades (pp. 14445)
57.
58.
59.
60.
61.
RUE DE MARX DORMOY
RUE DE MENTIMONTANT
RUE CAULAINCOURT
R
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D
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M
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IC
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C
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A
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C
H
A
P
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RUE LAMARCK
R
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U
STIN
E
RUE NORVINS
R. CARREAU
BOULEVARD NEY
A
V
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N
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D
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S
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N
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F
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A
IN
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RUE DE LA CHAPELLE
A
V
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N
U
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JE
A
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JA
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S
A
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N
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D
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F
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D
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RUE DE BELLVILLE
A
V
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S
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C
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S
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B
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D
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B
A
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N
O
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RUE DES ORTEAUX
RU
E AVRO
N
RUE DE LAGNY
BOULEVARD PERIPHERIQUE
RU
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RD
EN
ER
COURS DE VINCENNES
B
O
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D

D
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B
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L
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RU
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C
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C
A
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S

AVE DE SIM
O
N
B
O
L
IV
A
R

58
61
60 59
57
Sacr-Coeur, seen from rue Norvins, 1922
136
Sacr-Coeur, seen from rue Norvins, 1997
137
138
Le Moulin de la Galette, rue Lepic, 1899
139
Le Moulin de la Galette, rue Lepic, 1997
140
Place du Tertre, 1899
141
Place du Tertre, 1998
142
Place du Tertre, 1899
143
Place du Tertre, 1998
144
47 rue des Cascades, 1901
145
47 rue des Cascades, 1997

Saint-Cloud, Versailles, Sceaux
Saint-Cloud (pp. 14849)
Saint-Cloud (pp. 15051)
Saint-Cloud (pp. 15253)
Saint-Cloud (pp. 15455)
Saint-Cloud (pp. 15657)
Saint-Cloud (pp. 15859)
Versailles (pp. 16061)
Versailles (pp. 16263)
Versailles (pp. 16465)
Versailles (pp. 16667)
Parc de Sceaux (pp. 16869)
Parc de Sceaux (pp. 17071)
Parc de Sceaux (pp. 17273)
Parc de Sceaux (pp. 17475)
Parc de Sceaux (pp. 17677)
62.
63.
64.
65.
66.
67.
68.
69.
70.
71.
72.
73.
74.
75.
76.
Sceaux
Saint-Cloud
Versailles
68 69 70 71
62 63 64 65 66 67
72 73 74 75 76
148
Saint-Cloud, 1924
149
Saint-Cloud, 1998
150
Saint-Cloud, 1922
151
Saint-Cloud, 1989
152
Saint-Cloud, end of August 1924
153
Saint-Cloud, December 1998
154
Saint-Cloud, end of August 1906
155
Saint-Cloud, July 1998
156
Saint-Cloud, 1923
157
Saint-Cloud, 1998
158
Saint-Cloud, 1906
159
Saint-Cloud, 1998
160
Versailles, 1901
161
Versailles, 1998
162
Park of Versailles, 1902
163
Park of Versailles, 1998
164
Versailles, statue of Cyparisse by Flamen, 1902
165
Versailles, statue of Cyparisse by Flamen, 1998
166
Versailles, escalier de lOrangerie, 103 steps, 20 meters high, July 1901
167
Versailles, escalier de lOrangerie, 103 steps, 20 meters high, July 1998
168
Parc de Sceaux, vase, April 1925, 7 a.m.
169
Parc de Sceaux, vase, 1998
170
Parc de Sceaux, April 1925
171
Parc de Sceaux, December 1998
172
Parc de Sceaux, March 1925, 7.30 a.m.
173
Parc de Sceaux, 1998
174
Parc de Sceaux, March 1925, 8 a.m.
175
Parc de Sceaux, 1998
176
Parc de Sceaux, June 1925, 7 a.m.
177
Parc de Sceaux, 1998
178
179
Paris Regained
Rosamond Bernier
Looking at these hauntingly evocative Atget images and the equally evocative latter-day
photographs by Christopher Rauschenberg that are like the sympathetic vibrations set off by
certain musical sounds, I think of my days in Paris all over again.
I had lived in Paris during the 1950s and 1960s, always in the seventh arrondisse-
ment, and these photographs make me want to visit my old haunts again, not with a camera,
but with a new lens, a pair of eyes: How much is it plus a change? How much is it a new
look, not necessarily for the better?
I lived for many years in a handsome eighteenth-century house on the rue du Bac that
was owned by a substantial bourgeois family of stinginess worthy of a Balzac novel. The
S. family (principally old Madame S. and her son, Jean) occupied the grand frst foors; an
impressive stone staircase led to their quarters. Our more modest top foors were reached by
narrow, dimly lit stairs, and a small cage of an elevator. Through its open-work metal door
you could peer in at the other apartments as you creaked your way upward. One time I caught
sight of old Madame S. on her knees, scrubbing the Versailles parquet with a toothbrush.
Another relation, Professor Daniel S., who lived on the foor above Madame S. and
her son, had lost a hand in some undisclosed accident. He had not invested in a normal
prosthesis but had a metal hook, the kind worn by the pirate Captain Hook, which used to
scare me as a child in the story of Peter Pan. One of the more disconcerting sights was his
hook emerging from the elevator gate, pushing it to one side.
When something went wrong with the heating in our apartment, which was minimal
at best, Monsieur Jean would show up, tall and distinguished of aspect. He was too mean
to call in a professional and used to appear clad in what I thought of as his Do-It-Yourself suit,
frayed and somewhat short at the wrist. Down on his knees he would go and tap the radiators
hopefully with some archaic device.
In those days, the concierge occupied a dark cubbyhole at the left of the big entrance
door and would pull the cord to open the door that admitted you. No morethe reign of the
concierge is over. No longer can you wander into a courtyard to admire the garden at the back
you have to know the code and tap in the proper numbers on the panel at the buildings
street entrance. If you dont know the code and are expected for dinner, you will never make it.
In Paris recently, I went by my old address on the rue du Bac. By luck, someone was
coming out of the house, so I could slip into the entrance hall. There were the names of the
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present occupants, all presumably younger members of the S. familyplus a change. There
was one exception; the elegant little pavilion at the back of the courtyard used to be occupied
by the great bookseller/collector Pierre Brs. He died not long ago, and I recently read an
account of the auction sale of his stupendous holdingsan original edition of Diderots ency-
clopedia, rare illuminated manuscripts, magnifcent bindings. It took several days to complete
the sale, which made record prices.
Before I moved to the rue du Bac, I lived at the Hotel Pont Royal, nearby on the rue
Montalambert. It was nondescript but convenient. I had a small room with a turkey-red carpet
and an old-fashioned telephone on a cradle, which functioned only intermittently. Once,
maddened by not getting any response from the hotel telephone operator, I stormed down-
stairs and found her outside of her little cage, being measured for a dress by a friend.
The Pont Royal was the temporary home for a number of people whom I knew. Fred,
the concierge, was an invaluable honorary assistant. Monsieur Mir is arriving tomorrow
to work on his engravings with Monsieur Moulot, he might tell me, or Monsieur Matisse
telephoned for you and left a message, he wants to know where Monsieur Skira is.
Downstairs was the bar, a convivial meeting place. The publishing house of Gallimard
was just down the street, so the hotel bar attracted a number of house authors and their friends.
That is where I frst met Albert Camus, Balthus, and the soon to be famous psychoanalyst,
Dr. Jacques Lacan. Dr. Lacan lived and practiced at number 7 rue de Lille. Now, number 7 is
the locale of Karl Lagerfelds very chic new bookstore, specializing in his particular interests:
photography, poetry, and architecture.
On my recent trip to Paris I went to see the Hotel Pont Royal. Quelle horreur! as a
Nancy Mitford heroine might say. It was all tarted up in an unconvincing attempt at being
bohemian, with a display of irrelevant portrait photographs that included Oscar Wilde. And
my dear, dusky bar no longer existed at allinstead, it had been shrunk into a slither tucked
into a corner of the new shiny black-and-white lobby, with two or three bar stools.
At the other end of the rue du Bac was, and is, the Bon March, the oldest department
store in Paris, partly designed by Jean Eiffel. It had been the model for Emile Zolas Au
Bonheur des Dames. In my day, it was cluttered and fusty, the kind of place where Madame de
Gaulle might and did do her shopping. It would never have occurred to me to go there.
Now, the Bon March has a completely new life as one of the most stylish emporiums in town,
and its extraordinarily abundant and recherch food department was recently eulogized in the
New York Times.
Other local shopping news is less rosy. Throughout what used to be my neighbor-
hood, the seventh and sixth arrondissements, the deliciously quirky Mom and Pop stores
offering their specialties have been replaced. Now, there are deadeningly second-string
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branches of well-known labels in a second-rate echo of the Faubourg Saint-Honor. There are
endless shops offering undistinguished modern decoration.
The legendary Saint-Germain des Prs cafs, the Flore and the Deux Magots, where
once Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir kept regular offce hours and Alberto Giacometti
might drop by for one more very late night drink, have lost their character. Only the greenest
of tourists would hang out there to pay $10 for a cup of coffee.
However, the charcuteries, the patisseries, the fruits et legumes, and the prepared food
shops are as glorious and seductive as ever (and even more expensive). The wonderful
cheese shop Barthlmy on the rue de Grenelle, the Tiffany of cheese, still displays its chalky-
crusted varieties like precious jewels. And when buying, you are asked with almost reverent
concern: Is it for today or tonight? And at what time?
The restaurants are, as a whole, as inspired and even more pricey than ever. Where
else but in Paris would there be a restaurant called Le Souff that offers ffteen kinds of souf-
fs along with an ample spoonful of the appropriate sauce to be ladled into its lofty crater?
And where else but in Paris would a photographer be able to stand in the footprints
of his predecessor of one hundred years before and still see so many of the same buildings,
the same facade decorations, the same street furniture?




In Atgets Shoes
Christopher Rauschenberg
As I traveled through Paris rephotographing Atgets images, I kept
seeing places that he had not photographed but that seemed to me to
be also rich with the feeling of his work. I photographed hundreds
of those places where I felt Atgets spirit. I dont claim that Atget would
have photographed those places. I was simply walking around Paris
in Atgets shoes, and this is where they took me.
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Courtyard, Village St. Paul, 21 rue St. Paul, 1997
Square de Vert-Galant, 1997
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Jardin du Luxembourg garden, 1998 St. Gervais church, 1997
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Galerie Beaujolais, 1997 Rue Saint Etienne, 1997
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4 rue Scipion, 1997
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Jardin du Luxembourg, 1997
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24 rue de Sevigne, 1998 83 rue du Faubourg Saint Antoine, 1997
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St. Cloud, 1998
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St. Cloud, 1998 St. Cloud, 1998
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St. Cloud, 1998