Getty Museum

Coin rue de Seine

Date

1924

Medium

Gelatin silver printing-out paper print

Culture

French

Department

Photographs

Institution

Getty Museum

> Eugène Atget's photograph of this spiky, angular building at the junction of two streets on the Left Bank is strikingly like a set for a German Expressionist film, such as *Nosferatu* (1922). One nearly expects to see a caped vampire fleeing the dawn. However, a large part of this effect is due to the exceptionally dark printing of the negative, which makes the streets appear as if they are still enveloped by the night. Other prints of this image are far lighter and less dramatic. > > The neighborhood in which this intersection exists is one in which Atget consistently photographed. He made pictures of this wedge-shaped building in 1904, 1911, and 1924. The convergence of the streets posed for him the problem of balancing their perspective and the volume of the structure, as photo historian David Harris has pointed out. Sometimes Atget moved a little closer, sometimes a little to one side, but always so as to show the edifice's odd shape. This and its anonymity of style attracted his attention, although the building is devoid of specific historical importance. Its form was dictated by the site, the footprint of which was a result of the earlier history of this part of Paris. The rue de l'Échaudé, on the right, had been built along the line of a deep ditch that ran in front of and parallel to the fourteenth-century fortified walls of the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Près, which then lay outside the walls of the city. The rue de Seine, on the left, was built along a prolongation of a line that followed the city's fortifications. The structure itself still exists, although the present lineaments are uniformly bland, more like their state in 1904 than in 1924. > > A similarly shaped building—New York’s Flatiron Building—served as the subject of works by photographers Alfred Stieglitz and Alvin Langdon Coburn in the early twentieth century (see [84.XM.156.1](https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/62733/alfred-stieglitz-the-flatiron-american-1903/) and [84.XO.1133.8](https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/199495/alvin-langdon-coburn-the-flat-iron-british-negative-1909-print-1910/)). > > Adapted from *Eugène Atget*, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum by Gordon Baldwin (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2000), 72. ©2000, J. Paul Getty Trust.

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