The Invention of Paris (67 page)

Atget never had any direct contact with the Surrealist group: groups were not his forte, and he never took part in such things. Among the photos that Breton chose to illustrate some of his books, none was by Atget, and his name is nowhere mentioned in the group's publications. It is evident
enough that ‘these Paris photos herald Surrealist photography, that advance detachment of the only important column that Surrealism succeeded in shaking'.
³⁸
You can see what would have struck the Surrealists about these empty streets, like a dwelling without a tenant, in which the few human indications are the silhouettes of café waiters behind the windows, or the vague trace, during the exposure, of a passing individual or phantom. De Chirico also lived at 17 Rue Campagne-Première. With the shop windows that Atget photographed in his last years – the hairdresser on Boulevard de Strasbourg, the taxidermist on Rue de l'École-de-Médecine, the hatter on Avenue des Gobelins, the wigmaker at the Palais-Royal – with his extraordinary ‘accumulations' of boots, vegetables, caps, Atget anticipated Aragon's
Paris Peasant
.
³⁹
He crossed the early years of the century in his occult, stubborn and ungraspable fashion, a ‘city artist' in the sense that Hamish Fulton or Richard Long would later be ‘land artists', creating along the way, with amazing images, the inventory-installation –
Interior of M.C., Apartment Decorator, Rue du Montparnasse
or
Small Room of a Working Woman, Rue de Belleville
.

The period between the wars was a new golden age for Paris photography – indeed for French photography in general. It escaped the tendency that invaded painting, sculpture, literature, music and architecture around 1925: the return, after all those excesses of foreign origin, to well-polished craft, noble material, calm forms and fine language, the values of the French soil and culture. It was not only the followers of Charles Maurras who championed this neo-neoclassicism: the line Derain–Chardonne–Cocteau–Maillol–new-style De Chirico–Valéry (Trocadéro 1937 version) triumphed in Paris against a background of xenophobia and anti-Semitism. It was in no way surprising that a good number of virtuosos in bronze and the imperfect subjunctive found themselves in the Pétainist camp a few years later, if they were not open Nazis like Vlaminck or Brasillach.

If photography emerged unscathed from this pass, it was thanks to two interventions. There was first of all the violent antagonism of Dada, followed by Surrealism – co-substantial with photography – towards everything represented by Cocteau's ‘return to order' (Breton called Cocteau ‘the most hateful creature of his time'),
⁴⁰
as well as towards the generalized
academicism into which various avant-gardes would collapse (e.g. ‘Le Boeuf sur le Toit'), newly converted to the values and charms of the bourgeoisie (‘the Valérys, Derains, Marinettis, tumbling into the ditch one by one').
⁴¹
The other protective element was the influx of foreign photographers to Paris. Man Ray brought from New York the Dada spirit he had contracted from Marcel Duchamp. His charm gathered round him a group of photographers and artists of great talent and beauty – Berenice Abbott, Lee Miller, Meret Oppenheim, Dora Maar, ‘these women who expose their hair day and night to the terrible light of Man Ray's studio'.
⁴²
He was only the most popular in a long British and American line of Paris photographers: after Fox Talbot there was Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Alvin Langdon Coburn and Lewis Hine, and the series continued after 1945 with William Klein, Bill Brandt, Irving Penn and above all Robert Frank. (This natural openness of Anglo-American photographers contrasts with the little interest in Paris shown by English writers. Apart from Henry Miller's
Quiet Days in Clichy
, Hemingway's disturbing
Paris est un fête
, or Orwell's sympathetic but hardly convincing
Down and Out in Paris and London
, Henry James's
The Ambassadors
, a subtle work by a subtle author, fails in its object of depicting what is supposedly the motive of the book, the charm of Paris in summer. Even the addresses of his characters strike a false note, even their very names – so important a point that Balzac, as we saw, spent whole days roaming the city to hunt them out, whilst Proust, in his work on the
Recherche
, abandoned the symbolism of
Jean Santeuil
for surnames that are so extraordinarily pertinent – Swann, Charlus, Verdurin.)

Apart from Man Ray, almost all the photographers who settled in Paris between the two wars came from the East, that great East that has constantly fertilized Parisian life ever since the eighteenth century. Either Jews or political refugees (or both at once, like Robert Capa or Gisèle Freund), they had left Germany (Ilse Bing, Joseph Breitenbach, Raoul Hausmann, Germaine Krull, Wols), Poland (David Seymour, known as Chim, one of the founders of the Magnum agency), Lithuania (Izis, Moï Ver) or Hungary (Brassaï, André Kertész, François Kollar, Rogi André, Éli Lotar). They brought with them the German and Soviet photographic techniques of the years 1917–22. They also brought the faculty of astonishment, a new gaze on the metropolis. Tzara wrote in 1922 (and this passage that Walter Benjamin cites in his ‘Short History of Photography' applies to them very well): ‘When everything that goes under the name of art has
become paralysed, photography lights up its thousand-watt bulb, and sensitive paper absorbs the darkness of some everyday objects. It had discovered the importance of a tender and virgin flash of light, more important than all the constellations offered for the pleasure of our eyes.'

‘The invention of photography dealt a mortal blow to the old modes of expression, both in painting and in poetry, in which the automatic writing that appeared in the late nineteenth century was a genuine photography of thought.' This is how Breton began his text for the catalogue of Max Ernst's 1921 exhibition at the Sans-Pareil – one of the great Dada demonstrations in Paris. It was also the start of the ambiguous relationship between photography and what would become Surrealism; even (or especially) with the most automatic camera, photography did not readily produce images dictated by an automatism, as defined by the First Surrealist Manifesto. The Surrealists invented all sorts of procedures to draw photography out of its ‘realism': rayogram, solarization, multiple exposure (or ‘over-impression'), sometimes photomontage (more of a Dadaist or German technique), or again brûlage, a technique which Raoul Ubac, its inventor, explained was ‘an automatism of destruction, a complete dissolution of the image in the direction of the absolutely unformed'.
⁴³
In Surrealist photography, there is a cleavage between the manipulated image and that ‘naturally' obtained, a cleavage as deep as that separating the automatism of Miró or Masson from the magic illusionism of Magritte or Ernst. Aside from some few exceptions (Tabard's solarized
Place Vendôme
, or Dora Maar's distorted
22 Rue d'Astorg
), the Surrealist images of Paris are not manipulated photographs. Man Ray, a great inventor of various tricks, took very few photographs of Paris, and when Breton asked him to take some pictures to illustrate
Nadja
, he passed the job on to his assistant Jacques Boiffard, apart from the portraits of Éluard, Péret and Desnos.

In
Nadja
Breton obeyed his own injunction (‘And when all valuable books are no longer illustrated with drawings, appearing only with photographs'
⁴⁴
) with a very precise idea of what he wanted. In September 1927 he wrote to Lise Deharme:

I am going to publish the story that you know, accompanied with some fifty photographs relating to all the elements that it brings in: the Hôtel
des Grands Hommes, the statue of Étienne Dolet and the one of Becque, a sign saying ‘Bois-Charbons', a portrait of Paul Éluard, one of Desnos asleep, the Porte Saint-Denis, a scene from
Les Détraques
, the portrait of Blanche Derval, of Mme Sacco, a corner of the flea market, the white object in a casket, the
L'Humanité
bookshop, the wineshop on the Place Dauphine, the window of the Conciergerie, the Mazda advertisement, the portrait of Professor Claude, the woman at the Musée Grévin. I will also have to go and photograph the ‘Maison Rouge' sign at Pourville, the Ango manor-house.
⁴⁵

In a short
Avant-dire
of 1962, he wrote that ‘the purpose of the abundance of photographic illustration is to eliminate all description'. This was certainly not his only reason. The reinforcement of text by image produces the same gap as the double exposure of a photo, as
La Marquise Casati
's two pairs of eyes in Man Ray's picture, and this disturbing effect is deliberately underlined by the repetition of the corresponding phrase in the text as the caption for the photo, a procedure used in the popular novels that the Surrealists so appreciated.

The only success here – the illustrations to Breton's
Mad Love
or
Communicating Vessels
are too heteroclite to have the same effect – was Boiffard's images for
Nadja
, often described as banal and equated with postcards,
⁴⁶
but which are among the only Surrealist photographs in which the influence of Atget can be felt. Boiffard was indeed directly acquainted with Atget; as Man Ray's assistant, he worked at Rue Campagne-Première and lived there for a while. The locations are almost all empty of people, and the framing, as in Atget's late years, does not try to grasp an ensemble but rather to point out significant detail, such as the big arrow (‘Sign up here') on the
L'Humanité
bookshop, the signboard of the Sphinx Hôtel, the cart and ladder under the enormous lightbulb of the ‘illuminated Mazda advertisement on the Grands Boulevards'). Like Breton and Aragon, Naville and Fraenkel, Boiffard came to photography from medicine, and when Breton maintained that the tone he adopted for the narrative of
Nadja
was precisely copied from that of medical observation, Boiffard knew what he was talking
about.
⁴⁷
If anything is banal in this series of photos, it is the clinical style: in clinical examination, everything is banal except the result.

From the Cyrano on the Place Blanche to the Promenade de Vénus on Rue de Viarmes, the collective life of the Surrealist group was spent in a number of cafés. The Surrealists were the first to bring photography inside these places, which had so often been captured from outside by Atget. (This was a time of great advances in photographic film and materials: the Leica, the first 24
X
35 camera, was contemporary with
Nadja.
) With the greatest photographers – and for photos of cafés, this means Brassaï and Kertész, despite the possible objection that they were not formal members of the Surrealist group – there is the enormous and perceptible difference between an anecdotal image and a literary one. A young woman with lowered eyes is reading a newspaper in a café. Behind her through the window is the uniform grey of the empty street. In front of her, occupying the whole of the right half of the photo, is a cylindrical stove in punched metal, and on a small round table with a zinc border an empty cup of coffee. The young woman, wearing a black coat with a fur collar and a cloche hat with her hair escaping below it, is in the narrow space between the enormous stove and the windows on to the terrace – a position in which she seems threatened or at least fragile. This picture by André Kertész, which is like the start of a novel, is dated 1928 and carries the dreamy caption
A Winter Morning at the Café du Dôme
. In the corner of another café, this time on the Place d'Italie, a man and a woman look into each other's eyes, close enough to touch. Above the benches, the two walls that meet in a corner have large mirrors that almost come into contact at the centre of the picture, so that the woman's face is reflected in profile in the right-hand mirror and the man's in the left-hand one. The two mirrors are also reflected in each other. You see the abyss between these two individuals: the woman, mouth open, on the edge of ecstasy, and the man, who has his back to the photographer, but whose calculating look is detectable in the mirror. This is a photo of Brassaï's dated 1932, and titled with a certain cruelty
A Pair of Lovers in a Small Paris Café
.

The Surrealist photographers did indeed photograph love – whether tender as in Kertész's
Self-portrait with Élisabeth in a Montparnasse Café
, an exceptional image of amorous joy, or venal as in Brassaï's brothel scenes, in the tradition of Degas and Lautrec. They were the first to photograph the night (not
at night
, but night as a subject, as one photographs the sea),
the particular Paris night, the milieu of Surrealist culture, from Max Ernst's
Rvolution by Night
to ‘La Nuit du tournesol' in Breton's
Mad Love
, or the grating double of
Nadja
that is Philippe Soupault's
Last Nights in Paris
. Along with the painters and sculptors, they laid down the markers of a different tropism of movement, that of the object, and singularly of the found object, giving eternal life to such fetish objects as the metal mask (‘a very developed descendant of the helm') that Breton and Giacometti discovered at the flea market and that was photographed by Man Ray for
Mad Love
, or
Nadja
's bronze glove. And they extended the idea of the found object to fragments of Paris streets: Brassaï's graffiti, the details of gutters, railings around trees, paving stones and the torn posters photographed by Wols – twenty years before Hains and Villeglé tore these off walls to make them into ‘paintings'.

In the 1960s, the old connection between Paris and photography began to unravel. Among the explanations for this would be the global asphyxiation of black-and-white photography, the end of a generation of photographers formed at the time of the Popular Front, the Spanish war and the great films of Jean Renoir. And above all the unsteadiness of Paris under the brutal blows dealt it in the era of de Gaulle and Pompidou – what use would there be in showing its gaping wounds, its ulcers, its formless bumps? At the close of this era, May 1968 gave rise to the last famous photos of Paris, those of Gilles Caron, Dityvon, and a newcomer, Raymond Depardon, who would go on to invent a new genre of documentary on the city, the last example of which, with the simple title
Paris
, can be seen as a homage to the Gare Saint-Lazare.