Men’s Fashions

Description

In Men's Fashions, Atget provides an opportunity for viewers to see in front of and behind the camera simulatneously. In this oblique view of a Parisian shop window, reflections of trees and architecture along the Avenue des Gobelins blend with a stage storefront tableau of dapperly dressed mannequins. By framing the photograph this way, Atget creates an eerie scene in which the mannequins, their bodies fragmented by opaque reflections of the city street, appear animate within the shadowy interior of the shop. In Bar de Cabaret a mirror is similarly framed from an indirect angle, so that the interior and exterior of the bar seem to collide in the reflective surface.

Atget was one of the first photographers to emphasize such clever visual juxtapositions. He wandered the city taking in its strange visual delights, both with his eyes and his camera. This practice was in the tradition of the nineteenth-century Parisian figure of the flâneur, the "passionate spectator" of metropolitan life, immortalized by French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867). The chance encounters apprehended through such invested looking later became the staple of both Surrealist and documentary photography.