외젠 앗제의 사진에 나타난 근대적 도시 풍경 독해

초록

Eugène Atget, French photographer, left us more than ten thousand plates of photographs picturing the urban landscapes of Paris at the end of the 19th century and the early 20th. Atget took pictures of every part of Paris in the transfiguration since the massive reconstruction directed by Haussmann during the Second Empire, and sold them to the public institutions. After his death, there have been fierce controversies about whether his photographs should be seen as simple documentations or artistic works; the Atget problem. In contrast, there has not been much attention paid to the abundance of multi-layered images in his photographs which contain the changes of Paris and it’s conditions of life. In this context, Walter Benjamin’s thought on metropolis provides us with a theoretical resource for reading Atget’s photographs as historical testimonies telling the topography of ruins hidden behind the modern cityscape. The empty spaces of Paris with no human trace in his photographs cast light upon the other side of the modern metropolis characterized by the material richness, the rapid speed of industrialization, and flamboyant spectacles. In Benjamin’s view, Atget’s photographs appear as a kind of dialectical images in that they caught the historical fragments of their own times in the form of image and thereby debunked the urban myths. Also, the practices of Atget as a photographer had, like such marginal figures as prostitute or ragpicker whom modern order try to hide, an aspect of the modern hero simultaneously embodying and opposing the dominant tendencies of capitalism. Atget’s photographs about the vanishing and the forgotten give us, the city dwellers, a chance of looking back the past and thinking about the present.

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