Moustache Bed; Athens, May 2016

A patina of nostalgia and Parisian romanticism now covers Eugene Atget’s images of early 20th-century Paris: We tend to forget how much Paris was in turmoil at the time. Haussmann had just demolished the medieval quarters that formed the fabric of Hugo’s novel with Notre Dame at its center – with its wide avenues and covered arcades, he had essentially turned Paris into the blueprint for today’s shopping malls. The first mass-produced goods began to appear in the shop windows, and the slow displacement of crafts and manual labor that had begun with the rise of the electrically-powered loom had begun to accelerate.

And while his pictures of the first auto repair shops now evoke a sense of nostalgia in us, his feelings must have been those of astonishment and horror at the disappearance of the world he once knew. In the last years of his life, he retreated to the parks of Saint Cloud: Gone were the signs of modernity, gone were the zombie-like mannequins that populated his shop windows. All that was left were quiet lakes, a statue in the mist, an abandoned bench.

In 2016, Greece was still ailing from wave after wave of austerity that had rolled over the country to whip it into what was deemed fiscal responsibility. On the cusp of a massive sell-off of public property into the hands of looming investors, public spending fell, labor income disappeared, unemployment rose and eventually shops were closing down. With a shock doctrine previously reserved for Central American countries, Greece had become the first neoliberal laboratory on European soil.

None of this was visible in the images I brought back from a short trip to Athens in 2016. Although the despair was palpable as you walked the streets, life went on: The markets were bustling, there were some small shops in the center still open for tourists, and of course, the Acropolis still towered over the city: We’ve seen worse, we’re still here. The ruins of abandoned houses, the closed-down shops took on a general meaning of the “cycle of life”: The “creative destruction” of economic forces turned out to make “good pictures”. By ‘picturesque’ we mean the concealment of social and economic realities under a vague acceptance of the transience of human life.

Eventually, Atget’s pictures were claimed by the Surrealists: And so began the petrifaction of his first experience of a rapidly changing Paris.