The scene of the crime. Atget and surrealist photography

Abstract

Walter Benjamin presents the French photographer Eugéne Atget, death in 1927, as a precursor of surrealist photography and points out that his photos of a desert Paris not have been in vain compared with those of the scene of a crime. Several researches has become to highlight Atget's links to surrealism focusing in his personal relationship with the American photographer Man Ray, who has discoered his work soon after having arrived in France in 1921. This paper shows how Benjamin's lecture resends to surrealist interpretation of Atget's images, particularly to two chronicles of art written by Robert Desnos here recovered, where the metaphor of the crime scene and some other topics used until today to characterize his photos of Paris appear for the rst time.