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Atget Photography

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The life and the intention of Eugene Atget are fundamentally unknown to us. A few documented facts and a handful of recollections and legends provide a scant outline of the man:
He was born in Libourne, near Bordeaux, in 1857, and worked as a sailor during his youth; from the sea he turned to the stage, with no more than minor success; at forty he quit acting, and after a tentative experiment with painting Atget became a photographer, and began his true life's work.

Until his death thirty years later he worked quietly at his calling. To a casual observer he might have seemed a typical commercial photographer of the day. He was not progressive, but worked patiently with techniques that were obsolescent when he adopted them, and very nearly anachronistic by the time of his death. He was little given to experiment in the conventional sense, and less to theorizing. He founded no movement and attracted no circle. He did however make photographs which for purity and intensity of vision have not been bettered.

Why is this beautiful young woman not bathed in a flood of light, illuminating her youth and her pleasure? Because she is a prisoner in the tower. For what pretender prince did this dark Rapunzel let down her hair? Or for what terrific sacrifice is she preparing herself, to placate what cruel spirit? Is it the fringe of her shawl, behind her on the floor, or a scuttling crab?

Manuel Alvarez Bravo was born in the City of Mexico, behind the cathedral, near the place where the temples of the ancient Mexican gods once stood. Diego Rivera said of his photographs that they were Mexican in their format, their content, and their cause, and that they were therefore full of irony and anguish.

As a rule, photography has not been especially generous to those of her followers possessed by the romantic imagination, but every student of the medium will have his own considerable list of conspicuous exceptions. The romantic temper is distinguished by its quickness to find universal meanings in specific facts. It would seem that this tendency has more often been productive in the literary than in the visual arts, perhaps because pictures are more resolutely physical than words, and thus less accessible to quick symbolic transmutations. It is one thing to write about seeing the world in a grain of sand, and eternity in a flower, etc., and another thing to make a convincing picture of the idea. Photography especially has generally worked best when it has tried to discover the differences between the world and a grain of sand, rather than belabor their similarities.

On the other hand, pictures that deal only with particulars are useless, if not impossible, and in one guise or another all art doubtless involves a contest between the specific and the generic. In photography Alfred Stieglitz was perhaps the first to make an overt issue of the fact that a photograph could have several meanings (or that the meaning of a photography could have several faces) when he called his late photographs of clouds and other common subjects "equivalents," suggesting that they held optional, equal, alternative meanings.

Born and raised in Tokyo, Japan.

Tatsuya Sato's artistic background is learning from the people, books & films, local galleries, and nature on the road.
Much of his work has been inspired by the Beat Generation, their works and concepts.

In the meantime, Tatsuya felt a growing need to spend time on his own work. He decreased his commercial commitments, and concentrated more and more on his personal work.
His journey began at the age of 22 when he felt that "to see myself", with a Nikon F (35mm film camera) and later on having a Leica M3 & MP4.

People who accept the evidence of their senses can be divided into three non-professional categories: saints, simpletons, and humorists. The mass of mankind is insulated from these several species of misfortune by virtue of the fact that they know better than to trust plain experience.

For example, innumerable visitors to the museum in which Elliott Erwitt's picture was made saw precisely what he saw --- or would have seen it if their catalogue had not told them that they were seeing interesting early- and middle-period works by X, Y, Z, and two anonymous masters. Faced with a contradiction between what he sees and what he reads, the average person will ignore what he sees.

No mechanism has ever been devised that has recorded visual fact so clearly as photography. The consistent flaw in the system has been that it has recorded the wrong facts: not what we knew was there but what has appeared to be there.

This Achilles' heel of the medium has long been recognized by theorists, and has been identified as "superficial photographic accuracy," or "surface naturalism."

The word amateur has two meanings. In its classical sense it is the antonym of professional, and refers to those who pursue a problem for love rather than for the rewards the world may offer. In this sense the word often identifies the most sophisticated practitioners in a field; many of photography's greatest names have been amateurs as pure as the crocuses of spring, and many others, though mercenaries during the week, have done their best work on weekends.

The other and more popular meaning of the word identifies one who plays at his work: one not only less than fully competent, but less than wholly serious. (The professional is allowed to be less than competent, but never less than serious.) This second variety of amateur is generally handicapped by ignorance of the craft and the tradition of the medium, and is therefore wholly dependent on his or her native, God-given, unique talent and sensibility. This is almost never enough.