St. Julien le Pauvre-Portail (St. Julien le Pauvre-Facade)

When Eugène Atget photographed the front of the venerable church of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, other buildings hemmed it in. (Those on the left have now mostly been removed.) The setting seems medieval, reflecting the origins of the church. The sixth-century chapel here was destroyed by the Normans in the ninth century and was ultimately replaced by a church and priory constructed between 1170 and 1240 in a style transitional from the Romanesque to the Gothic. Remnants of this architecture are visible on the left. While serving as the parish church of the University of Paris, it was sacked in 1524 by students unhappy with the results of an election held there for a new rector of the schools. When the dilapidated church was reconstructed in 1651, the first two bays of its nave were eliminated and the present simple facade erected. The scars on the Doric pilasters of its face are the marks of buildings attached to it when it was used for salt storage during the French Revolution. After functioning as a wool depot, it was reconstituted as a church in 1826 and transferred to the Greek Melchite rite in 1889, whose congregation it still serves.

Atget's image is shaped by the arched area at the top of the photograph, caused by the incomplete coverage of the glass-plate negative by the lens. The viewer’s eye is led back by the central gutter in the tilted paving stones of the street toward the facade until the drain veers left. The eye shifts to the church's guardian, comfortably seated by the open doors at the entrance and gazing straight at the camera. As the ground around the church is now higher than when it was built, one steps down into the church, a mark of its antiquity. The battered, darkened stone; sloping, rough-edged paving blocks; and confining walls create a nearly palpable sense of claustrophobia, a kind of nightmare where the only exit is to plunge into the blackness of the church.

Adapted from Eugène Atget, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum by Gordon Baldwin (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2000), 14. ©2000, J. Paul Getty Trust.