We're looking at a photograph by Eugène Atget, one that he called Pendant l'Eclipse, or During the Eclipse, that he made in April, 1912. It's of a crowd of people shielding their eyes while trying to observe the eclipse in the Place de la Bastille in Paris. Atget was much better known for taking pictures of Paris. Street scenes often made early in the morning and his process meant that there are generally very few people in his pictures. One of the things you could say about Atget's work is that it's quite timeless. So this one is quite unusual in that there's a whole crowd of people, and also that it's around a particular event. This is a picture of a solar eclipse. So what that means is that the moon is coming between the sun and the Earth and effectively blocking the sun's light. And you see the little viewing apparatuses that the people are holding up in order to see it. I think it's really interesting to note that this picture was made two days after the Titanic sunk. And that sense of foreboding, of mystery, of uncertainty about the future, about natural phenomenon, whether it be icebergs or eclipses. I can't help but think that the Titanic would be in the minds of many of the people gathered in this place looking at the eclipse. It's important to know that Atget was working with a large view camera on a tripod. The negative that Atget used was a glass plate negative. It was 18 by 24 centimeters, which is about eight by ten inches. And it has a capacity for holding great detail. The only downside was that it took a fair amount of time to expose. So it wasn't ideally suited to making pictures of people. It was better used, and Atget used it more frequently, to take pictures of the built environment. And those plates were less sensitive to blue light in the early years of photography. So often what that meant is that the sky would look white no matter what the weather was or whatever time of day. The exception to that is of course the top left corner of the image where you see this dark space encroaching. And that is due to the alignment, or slight misalignment, of the lens with the back of the camera, which is called vignetting. These images aren't cropped at all. In fact, they are what we call contact prints. And Atget's way of printing was to place a piece of photographic paper in contact with these negatives, squeeze them together, and place it out in the sun so the image would emerge on the paper through the action of light through the negative. So, there's a one to one relationship between the size of Atget's negative and the sizes of all of his prints. Atget was very clear about why he made photographs. He had a sign outside his studio that said document pour artiste, which means documents for artists. He had a very self-effacing, straightforward, modest approach to photography. Now in fact what he made were extraordinary photographs that really explored the nature of looking through a camera. This is a picture of an eclipse, which is in a certain way, a picture of the moon. Although neither the moon nor the sun are anywhere within the frame of the image. But it's a picture about looking at the moon, which has been a source of endless fascination, not only for photographers and astronomers, but also for laypeople on the street.
