The gardens of Atget: how the humanities help us see what is not visible

A response to “Humanities and Wholeness” from a reader of the site.

“So ist schnellvergänglich alles Himmlische, aber umsonst nicht” – Friedrich Hölderlin
[Thus is quickly passing everything of heaven, but not in vain]

2 February 2019, Buchhandlung zum Wetzstein, Freiburg im Breisgau

Dear editor,

I was pleased to read the latest Observation even as I found it wanting in several respects. It broached a serious theme and its argument had a clear structure. Yet in my view it did not carry its argument on “wholeness” to its ground. This ground is that the humanities provide wholeness because they see what is not visible and they hear what is not said. In short, they foster a sensibility for latency, an awareness that what seems hidden or absent completes the whole.

            In the central section of the Observation, at the fulcrum of its argument, so to speak, it brought forward the work of three photographers: Atget, Weegee, and Winogrand. I would like to elucidate my point by discussing Atget, in particular the photographs he took of the Luxembourg gardens and those of Saint-Cloud during the first decades of the twentieth century. Atget’s work ethic is apparent to anyone who even cursorily reviews his biography. In particular, the notes by John Szarkowski in his splendid volume on Atget raise our appreciation of him as a working artist, in the sense that he lived prosaically by his work, documenting doorways, streets, and other venues around Paris. At the same time, his photos engage us because they, like the humanities, tell us what we are missing.

            Gardens, too, are a powerful symbolic locus to show the presence of imagined absence. We may think on the earthly and celestial paradise, Eden once and eternal, or the place that marks, in its serenity, time’s passing. That second garden is set in Thomas Hardy’s lines:

I went by the Druid stone
That broods in the garden white and lone,
And I stopped and looked at the shifting shadows
That at some moments fall thereon
From the tree hard by with a rhythmic swing,
And they shaped in my imagining
To the shade that a well-known head and shoulders
Threw there when she was gardening….

“The Shadow and the Stone”

Hardy’s meter provides us its own “rhythmic swing” that marks the swaying of branches and memory, providing a tension that keeps transience in balance, or at least in check.

            Atget, too, loved the trees and monuments in his gardens, more and more so, increasingly with age, and these hold for us the secrets, the hidden features, he wished to reveal.

            I put here two photos from the Jardin du Luxembourg, taken in 1902 and 1906:

 

Eugène Atget
Luxembourg Gardens, 1902 – 1903, Albumen silver print
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

 

Eugène Atget
Luxembourg Gardens, about 1906, Albumen silver print
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

One might say there is nothing remarkable about these scenes. They document an area or a decoration. In the first, we see an avenue lined with trees that lead to the imposing structure in the center-right background. In the second, we are looking at an urn with flowers. Nothing more! Atget was earning his keep as a professional photographer, creating an inventory of objects that he could then sell to interested designers and architects.

            But in these first photographs there is much more than appears at first glance. Atget draws our eyes to the left foreground, and we are taken in by the sharp diagonal of the avenue contrasting with the vertical trees, or the floral details. There is life on this left-hand side, as opposed to the inert stone or faded flowers in the right background. We are witnessing a moment: the people in the park, sitting or standing, the flowers in their instant of bloom, like a Dutch still life. Atget documents more than a building or vase; he documents a moment, informing us of the moments we overlook or pass on to fading memory.

            If Atget shows us irreplaceable moments in these photographs at Luxembourg, his later ones at Saint-Cloud are more puzzling:

 

Eugène Atget
St. Cloud, 1915 – 1919, Albumen silver print
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

 

Eugène Atget
Saint-Cloud, 1922, Albumen silver print
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

In these, the water is as important as the land or vegetation. The pool, dimly apparent in the Luxembourg photo, is now at center stage, as Atget plays with the shape of reflection. These are more self-conscious in their making, images of images, meta-photographs. I would go so far as to say that Atget is no longer documenting a moment as recording something deeper: the ephemeral and the transient.

            How can this be? And why is it important? Explanations are in order. In the first of these photographs, we see a study in contrasts between the dark foliage, the mounds of leaves, and the white of the statues and the sky. Our eyes meet the image on the right foreground, and the scarred lip of the reflecting pool takes us to the opening between the trees where the statues appear to vanish and recede on the luminous path to what – oblivion? Hardly. We are not witnessing a fading as much as an opening to a broader vision. We lose sight of the statues, yet imagine them in their disappearance, in their sequential movement out of view. The open sky allows this to happen. The artifice of the garden yields to the nature of the unpruned trees that also leave their mark on the pool. Human care, cultivation, and monuments appear to give way to nature’s forces, yet this process of yielding is recorded by the artist’s craft.

            In the last photograph, we see no visible artifice, no garden monuments, only trees at the edge of a pond. The straight trees of Luxembourg have changed to ones with angular trunks and branches, reaching toward one another as they fence for light. It is the stillness of early spring, when the earth gathers its resources to fulfill its annual promise. Though Atget photographs the pond only in the bottom third, he accents the clarity of the reflection: the reflected image of the trees is sharper, more distinct, than the image of the trees themselves. It is as if Atget is playing in Plato’s cave, where the denizens look only on the shadows of things cast by a fire. These shadows, he seems to say, in this fire-lit realm are more visible, more real, than reality itself. Beware the philosopher who would tell you otherwise!

            It is play, a type of serious joke, since it is also a philosophical statement about what appears to be reality, which changes from instant to instant. The arts, like the humanities, provide this roundness of vision that supersedes any technical expertise or specification. A still photograph conveys the movement of our lives and the way the greater truth appears in a moment, should we remain alert to its presence. That is the deeper sense of wholeness, which we may understand also with the German das Heilsame: the whole and the healing.

Prof. Dr. Ingeborg Sternträger

For other posts on gardens and the humanities, see here