Are there books on your shelves that you pull out every few years without knowing why and that then magically feed your soul? Recently, in need of such nourishment, I pulled out two such treasures.
On my bookshelves I have had for years Paris: Eugene Atget 1857-1927, a Taschen edition of several collections of his photographs, edited by Hans Christian Adam, with essays by Andreas Krase and Walter Benjamin. It’s structured by sets of images just as Atget conceived and shot them. Portfolios include the architecture and streets of an old Paris that would begin disappearing in his lifetime, its salespeople and traders, stairways, interiors, window displays, pre-automobile vehicles, the marginalized inhabitants of shanty-towns, the women whose work, carried out in “houses of pleasure”, was to provide pleasure to their male customers, the Fairs that provided entertainment for the masses, as well as the outskirts of Paris, and its parks and castles. After army service, working as an actor, and trying his hand at being a painter, Atget came in his thirties to photography in its heyday, chronicling the buildings that dated from before the Revolution, and the stately squares, but always avoiding iconic shots that scream “Paris”, seeking the intense presence to be found in the neglected, mundane, ordinary scenes of life in his adopted city. As a business, he was documenting things for painters to use in their work. But as the essence of an Observer he was also capturing the impermanent for himself. With half demolished buildings featuring often, Atget was, consciously or not, capturing things, places, situations that were about to disappear. His shots of the city and buildings, often devoid of people, evoke a sort of haunting presence/absence. His work had a huge impact on Surrealism, and influenced photographers such as Walker Evans, and later Irving Penn and Lee Friedlander. A young Berenice Abbott was taken with and championed his work and photographed him near the end of his life.
The context of Atget’s work goes back to the aggressive urban redevelopment of Paris by Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann at the behest of Napoleon III, begun in the 1850s and continuing into the 1920s. Neighborhoods that went back to the Middle Ages, perceived as slums, full of cholera and potential civil unrest, were demolished to make way for wide, straight, elegant, rational and surveillable thoroughfares. The banks of the Seine were paved, little tragic tributaries like the Bievre were covered over, areas outside the city gates were annexed, doubling the size of Paris. Part of the pragmatic appeal of photography was as a tool to document what was being wiped away; and as a corollary to that, a certain nostalgia took hold. Atget’s fanatical devotion to his task was part of this climate of change and remembrance. By the 1920s, it was clear that modernism in all its forms, was sweeping away the old at an astonishing rate.
The effect on me of looking at this book is remarkable. Afterwards, the world looks slightly different, deeper, more alive, richer, and more complex. It’s akin to that of emerging from a Jacques Tati movie to have the way the world looks be transformed into a slightly absurd tragicomic version of itself. I recall how I loved these photographs from the first time I saw them in my early twenties. And I intuit how all my photographic process links to them in some ineffable way – when I take pictures I am aspiring to make images as haunting as these.
Which leads me to the other book that has a similar quietly exhilarating effect on me every time I revisit it, over the years: The Luminous Ground, the fourth volume of Christopher Alexander’s sweeping series The Nature of Order. This one is subtitled An Essay on the Art of Building and The Nature of the Universe.
As with earlier volumes, A Pattern Language and The Timeless Way of Building, this work is about design as a spiritual practice that can give true functionality to the structures that humans produce. The ordering of space and matter here is linked with inner experience, both emotional and intellectual, opening up a realm where perception verges on the fundamentals of cognition and Beauty. Alexander’s concern with real sustainability is connected to design and production practices (architecture, carpentry, glassblowing, tiling, bricklaying, etc) that enable the capacity for genuine bonding between people and their built environment, which is lacking in so much of our modern industrial civilization.
From medieval monastery gardens to “Oriental” carpets, from Chinese bronzes to classic painting from Fra Angelico to Gaugin, the attention to detail is exemplary. A huge focus is on color and on what we might call ‘composition.’ For example how a beautiful fireplace can express both unity and sadness. A key concept here is the idea of ‘centers’. Alexander suggests that a truly wonderful image or building creates a center, what he calls an "I" and is a sort of "being". The connectedness of beings is somehow sacred and the experience of perceiving this is a deep joy.
This book needs to be read, not explained. The Reader/Viewer must directly engage and experience how the images presented illustrate a sacred ‘inner light’, a kind of “I” beyond the individual ego which constitutes a fuller knowledge of ‘the Self’ that is both vulnerable and transcendent. Alexander refers to it as “a mirror of the human heart.” The result is a “not-separateness”, the connection between our own substance and the substance of the universe wherein consciousness is fundamental.