As a way of beginning, one might compare the art of photography to the act of pointing. All of us, even the best-mannered of us, occasionally point, and it must be true that some of us point to more interesting facts, events, circumstances, and configurations than others. It is not difficult to imagine a person-a mute Virgil of the corporeal world-who might elevate the act of pointing to a creative plane, a person who would lead us through the fields and streets and indicate a sequence of phenomena and aspects that would be beautiful, humorous, morally instructive, cleverly ordered, mysterious, or stonishing, once brought to our attention, but that had been unseen before, or seen dumbly, without comprehension. This talented practitioner of the new discipline (the discipline a cross, perhaps, between theater and criticism) would perform with a special grace, sense of timing, narrative sweep, and wit, thus endowing the act not merely with intelligence, but with that quality of formal rigor that identifies a work of art, so that we woud be uncertain, when remembering the adventure of the tour, how much of our pleasure and sense of enlargement had come from the things pointed to and how much from the pattern created by the pointer.

To note the similarity between photography and pointing seems to me useful. Surely the best of photographers have been first of all pointers-men and women whose work says: I call your attention to this pyramid, face, battlefield, pattern of nature, ephemeral juxtaposition.

But it is also clear that the simile has flaws, which become obvious if we consider the different ways in which the photographer and the hypothetical pointer work. The formal nature of pointing (if the notion is admissible) deals with the center of an undefined field. The finger points to (of course) a point, or to a spot not much larger: to the eyes of the accused, or a cloud in the sky, or a finial or cartouche on a curious building, or to the running pickpocket-without describing the context in which the spot should be considered. An art of pointing would be a conceptual art, for the subject of the work would be defined in intellectual or psychic terms, not by an objective physical record. The pointing finger identifies that conceptual center on which the mind's eye focuses-a clear patch of the visual field that one might cover with a silver dollar held at arm's length-outside of which a progressive vagueness extends to the periphery of our vision.

The photographer's procedure (and problem) is different, for whether he means to or not he will make a picture of sorts: a discrete object with categorical edges.

Eugene Atget was a commercial photographer who worked in and aroud Paris for more than thirty years. When he died in 1927, his work was known in part to a few archivists and artists who shared his interest in the visible record of French culture. Little is known about is life, and less about his intentions, except as they can be inferred from his work. In his lifetime Atget made perhaps ten thousand photographs; almost all of these describe the historic character of French life, as indicated by its architecture, its landscape, its work, and its unconsidered, vernacular gestures....

It might be said that Atget made no portraits-that his pictures of window- washers, knife-sharpeners, peddlers, postmen, etc., describe the generic role, not the individual player. It is remarkable that Atget's collection, when aquired by Bernice Abbott, contained not a single portrait of even one of his friends and associates....

In his early work, Atget, like most intelligent beginners, tried many things. Many of his early pictures attempt a direct reportage of ephemeral contemporarty life: groups of people at work or play, the bustle of the street, events of topical interest, etc. Most of these pictures seem merely circumstantial, and insufficiently formed, but a few succeed very well. These successes, to a photographer of appropriate temperament, would have been adequate encouragement; this line of exploration could only have been profitably pursued, preferably with one of the splendid new hand cameras rather than the ponderous and refractory stand camera that Atget used. There was, however, an opposing strain in Atget's early work which-we must assume-pleased him more. These pictures are still, simple and poised, and concern themselves not with reportage but with history. Very early in his career Atget stopped trying to catch the world unaware....

The intensity of Atget's attention might be measured by the frequency with which he returned to certain families of subject matter. He loved dooryards, with their climbing vines, window boxes, caged canaries, and worn stone doorsteps; and courts with neighborhood wells in them, immemorial centers of sociability, news, and contention. Atget's pictures describe such places with a sharp but tactful scrutiny. They define a meeting ground between domestic and civil life, the innermost plane of the private person's public face.

This essay excerpted from the catalogue essay for The Work of Eugene Atget: Old France, c. 1981 by the Museum of Modern Art, New York

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