Coiffeur, Palais Royal, Eugène Atget; Joel Snyder

Episode 55 Dec-2005, Brett Knappe, Photography Intern I’m David Cateforis with another art minute from the Spencer Museum of Art. It is difficult to imagine a more surreal concept than photography. The notion of capturing light to form an image that mimics the real world, while remaining separate from it, attracted many Surrealist artists. An example of this connection can be found in the career of Eugène Atget, a French photographer who in the early 20th century labored to document all of Paris. While Atget denied artistic intention in his work, the Surrealists found a distinctive visual poetry in his interpretation of the City of Light. With a little imagination, Atget’s photograph “Coiffeur, Palais Royale,” in Spencer Collection, becomes a multi-layered montage of real and imagined space, rather than a Parisian hairdresser’s storefront. Despite their apparent artificiality, the wigs in this photograph feign the appearance of actual heads of hair and the plastic mannequins mirror typically feminine physiognomies. Thus, while Atget certainly was not a Surrealist photographer, his complex photographs inspired the Surrealist exploration of the boundaries between the real world and imagination. With thanks to Brett Knappe for his text, from the Spencer Museum of Art, I’m David Cateforis.