Backing Tracks Sloe Gin

photo makes true that we are all tourists

fell into my hands recently in a photo album entitled Eugene Atget Paris . While you may hit the wrong term, because sat on a shelf for several years now (damn it, Mom, you had it hit me after watching łepetynie and order), and I walked by him, probably unconsciously, several times a day.

Atget lived from 1857 to 1927. He spent 30 years documenting the turn of the century Paris, who happened to be przepoczwarzał into something newer and modniejszego, spitting out the old houses and sleep with anyone you do not need dark alleys.

Atget of Pharmaceutical accuracy and great patience, made an extraordinary documentation of streets, buildings, parks, shop windows, trucks, vehicles, interior decorations and the people who inhabited this space. He avoided capture classic elements of views and new urban landscape. In 1920 he wrote: "I can say that I have all the old Paris."

"documents for artists" - sign on the door of destiny betrayed his pictures - purely utilitarian, without any artistic ambition (which seems to be booked for you at that time pictorialists ).

His photographs are not mere documents that provide us with only the shape, texture, tone, purpose - some are very personal. Each photo is somewhat personal, because it's the photographer chooses the time and place, pushing a small piece of reality being a fleeting moment for some light-sensitive medium, but an outstanding photographer attached to this any more emotions and feelings that he wants to convey. At this point the document becomes personal.

Someone somewhere once (which for too much information), said that photography makes us all the tourists. Google, wonderful extension of my memory (although I do not know if you can extend something so short, but I know there is such a thing on the Internet extend:) said that Susan Sontag's quote is this: BODY {

"The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and Eventually in one's own. "

I was wondering what that means to the end and still do not know. O what a tourist is going on? Can we say a group of Japanese who pstrykają pics at random and then your friends can be proud that they were where he fell, or maybe a tourist is someone who does not slip on the surface, but at least someone who genuinely seeks to understand, get to the bottom, to live and experience?

the way, can the Japanese, this is enough and really experiencing a very deep understanding of how all of them so hurry this stock? Although no one here appreciate. Suppose that a Japanese tourist is just such an expression. Sam I am Japanese tourist.

let it be the real tourist. No, but a tourist in other people's reality? We're talking about the world of the photographer, or a world of people, whose photographs? Pictures allow us to perhaps try and understand both sides of the camera - to visit this tiny slice of space and time chosen by the photographer for any particular reason, and also learn something about the photographs, which actually took this photo.

And what does it mean that in the end we become tourists in their own world?
again reminded me a quotation - This time with "Travelling with Herodotus Kapuscinski: "(...)

other worlds is a mirror in which to look through us and our culture. By which we can better understand ourselves, as we can not determine his identity until confront it with others. "

While these "other worlds" Kapuscinski apply to other cultures, but whether or not it's the same with our own, private worlds? If through the photos of others becomes a tourist, someone who tries to understand the reality that surrounds other people, then maybe I can finally understand the reality that surrounds me? Maybe thanks to this I can finally understand myself? And may also discover the occasion of the surprising truth that the reality of people in the photo and my world form a single whole and the problems and ills of the tragedy of the pictures, it is also the tragedy of my own world, one in which resides my own ass.

Atget is a man of the passing century (unfulfilled actor). His technique and workshop, a photographer is a thing of the past - is old-fashioned, outdated, goes slowly to rest - just like the old Paris, who at his most moving pictures. People reportedly urged him to change his technique, which would provide greater durability lab, but he answered only: "I do not know how to do it."

Is Atget feel nostalgic for the departing world of the nineteenth century, which may be the metaphor of sleep in houses crying for repair or demolition?
Do sympathized kloszardom, the Collector of rags, the children looking curiously from behind the windows of the building walącego?

His photos characterized by a multitude of details. Everywhere you can find traces of daily life - carts, brooms - as if somewhere behind the photographs was hidden another reality.

Some pictures can be seen for a long time. In the end, it is noted ass horse standing across the street, or that the head in the rebound Atget is a head looking at him from behind the other side of the door man.

recommend a very good article by Mariusz Hermanowicz . And for dessert after the show walk and interesting project recapitulating old pictures of our current reality.