Reflection
I saw the exhibition of ‘Old Paris’ with my friend last Sunday at Art Gallery of New South Wales. I spent a whole afternoon looking closely at each single photograph. I learned photography from 2007 to 2009 in Shanghai. I like the way that Eugene Atget captured the city of Paris. Both the subjects and the structure of his photographs show his personal tastes. It is different from other photographers.
I decided to write a critical review of the exhibition of ‘Old Paris’. It is about art, Atget and old Paris. I was touched by Atget’s works and I planned to tell ‘why’ in my critical review. It is my understanding of Atget’s ‘Old Paris’. I hope it is not an advertisement. The exhibition is still in Sydney now. People might be interested in Atget’s life. I think my opinion article has the news worthy of proximity, human interest and prominence.
I hope photography lovers or even some junior photographers could be inspired by Atget to capture today’s Sydney in their own way.
Before I started writing, I did a lot of research about Eugene Atget and how does Paris look like in the late nineteenth century and the early twenties century. I did a lot of reading of critical review articles from magazine to get be inspired.
(By Eugene Atget)
Granato (1990) says the best feature leads are short, stark statements that create suspense. I hope my lead “I was attracted to the world on the wall at first glance” works. I explained what attracted me immediately with the following sentence “It is a disappearing Paris recorded in Eugene Atget’s photographs.”
For the body of my opinion piece, I give more detail of “Old Paris”, photographer Eugene Atget as background information. I try to see how Atget’s life experience affected his photographs. That is my method to critic his works. That is also my logic, or structure, to run my opinion article.
I use narrative language to tell a little of Atget’s life. For instance, I say “Atget met his life partner, actress Valentine Compagnon in 1886…” in my article to highlight his life. I use the skill of describing to engage the reader with Atget’s photographs of ‘Old Paris”. For example, I set a scene via saying “…sky is grey on Paris’ foggy days. The roads, alleys, facades, squares, courtyards and adjoining houses in his photographs are quite remote from grand gestures…Paris in his works seems like a lost city somewhere between night and dawn.” I select some quotes from other artists to balance the opinion. For example, American artist Man Ray says Atget’s Paris is “still and seemingly empty yet full of extraneous detail”.
I am not going to summarize what I have said as the end. I want to give a short but powerful end in a circular way for my opinion piece, which is recommended by Granato (1990) who also says “your final paragraph echoes something mentioned in the lead to bright back your reader to the lead”. Therefore, I say “I must not be the only person who cannot move in front of his photographs, and picture myself in mind on the deserted street of old Paris, a very dreamlike world…” in the end to bring my reader back to my lead, in which I says “I was attracted to the world on the wall at first glance”.
Bibliography:
Granato, L 1990, Newspaper feature writing, Deakin University Press, Geelong, Victoria.
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