Simon Van Booy Gets Lost in Atget’s Paris

Instead of telling us about one of his favorite short story writers, as many Beatrice guests do when they have a new collection of their own stories, Simon Van Booy has elected to reveal another one of the inspirations that shaped The Secret Lives of People in Love. We don’t talk as much as we could about the visual arts on this blog, so Simon’s essay is a welcome surprise.

There is no greater comfort for a very lonely person than to see the photographs of Eugéne Atget. The first time my eyes fell upon the headless torso of a classical statue, crumbling in a winter park—then turned the page to an empty garden chair on a balcony of stray leaves, I felt the panic of an unexpected embrace. I closed the book and sat down on a small ladder. I was at The Strand; it was autumn. My hiding places were no longer secret. Someone else had used them a hundred years ago.

I was like an orphan who had accidentally unearthed an album of photographs that bore the faces of his lost family. Discovering these misty, black and white pictures mitigated the pain of a long loneliness. I no longer felt invisible. My vision of the world was shared—even celebrated. There were people here before me. People had walked in my shoes—had stopped to look at park benches softened by rain. They had left notes in the walls. I was a part of some ongoing love affair with overlooked details, an affair that had not begun with me and would not end with me. I was not the only person governed by feelings rooted in that most secret form of isolation: the ability to be alive and to be a ghost at the very same moment.

It’s not that I saw Atget’s work, which then influenced my work, but through Atget, I found the confidence to keep going, to take chances, to allow myself to explore the dark woods where the secrets of my characters lay buried. And so, I set one of my stories, “Some Bloom in Darkness,” within the photographs of Atget. If you look at the images very closely, you might even see my protagonist standing on a wall with his walking stick in the water, or on a bench sketching small birds. There are writers from whom we learn, and there are those who by some mysterious circumstance we come to know as members of our own family.

Atget’s pictures present the world so beautifully devoid of human presence; the viewer conjures figures and sets their shadowy bodies within the frames of the photographs. At every turn, Atget’s photographs remind us how important and inescapable it is to be human; how necessary each single human gesture is to our lives. In Atget’s world, people pass on snowy country paths and never forget one another. A soldier sits on a bench and looks into a world of which he is still a part. The stark plainness of these photographs is an integral part of their magic. The scarred trees with broken limbs stand strong; the dull beauty of lakes held together by dirty marble ledges, the store mannequins looking out into a world they don’t understand. They are all overjoyed, beautiful, ageless with black eyes. Their expressions mock us. But there is nothing mute about the content of the photographs; each image trembles with the potential for love; the potential for loss. Atget’s physical world is only seemingly arbitrary; it is a forgotten set of emotional hieroglyphs.

Nobody knows why Atget photographed the world. He started doing it when he was in his thirties. Atget gives us the world as it is—a world of waiting, of absence, of wind, of promises yet to be made; of promises held like breaths. And in such supernatural emptiness, as is presented in the landscape of Atget, there is no human action which doesn’t suddenly seem holy; a foot in the mud, a face behind the curtain, an organ grinder and his daughter who can’t stop laughing. There is nothing to see in the work of Eugéne Atget until the moment you stop looking.

17 August 2007 | guest authors |