Derivas parisienses em negativo: revelações de um espaço-tempo perdido reencontrado

Named by Walter Benjamin as the “19th century capital”, the city of Paris is portrayed by Eugène Atget (1857-1927) as a constantly moving metropolis built on the ruins of ancient Lutetia. The photographer's mission is precisely to record the vestiges of Old Paris doomed to disappear under the auspices of the urban reform headed by Baron Haussmann. According to Benjamin, his photographs foretell surrealism, since they make possible the exploration of the revolutionary energies that appear in the old fashioned, the objects abandoned by fashion, the professions rendered obsolete and / or in the tortuous alleys and dead ends that make of its frames the perfect scenery of a crime. As the last refuge of the aura, his portraits mark the period when the value of cult begins to be surpassed by the value of exhibition, which confers to the present day the challenge of reading his images – at once, magical and technical – as the very epitaph of an epoch.