Charenton, Vieux Moulin (The Old Mill, Charenton)

Of the several views that Eugène Atget made of this modest mill at Charenton, close to the point where the Marne River joins the Seine River, only this one makes it seem monumental. (Charenton is on the southeast outskirts of Paris, adjacent to the Bois de Vincennes.) Because of the camera's compression of planes, the various components of the image have been flattened into what seems to be a Cubist collage. It is hard to resolve these spatial elements visually, but underlying the composition is a formal geometry that is anything but Cubist. The principal bulk of the building vertically bisects the picture plane, while the springing arch of the wheel-less mill and the coping of the wall to the right horizontally halve the photograph, producing quadrants that are violated only by the strong diagonal of the grassy bank in the foreground.

Atget made very few views during World War I, as he was too traumatized by its disruptions and privations to have much appetite for work. The national institutions that were collectors of his pictures had suspended their purchases from him, and the bombardments of Paris caused him to safeguard his negatives by storing them in the basement of the building where he lived. This image of 1915 is one of the last he made before completely discontinuing photography during 1917 and 1918.

Originally published in Eugène Atget, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum by Gordon Baldwin (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2000), 60. ©2000, J. Paul Getty Trust.