Photos by Eugène Atget as expression of objectivity of architecture: Hôtel de Beauvais

The article compares the representation of architecture in French and Russian academic art history, on the one hand, and in Eugène Atget’s photographs, on the other. The starting point for the art historical descriptions is Jacques-François Blondel’s analysis, supported by Jean Marot’s drawings. The choice of characteristics analyzed by Blondel and later researchers reflects the schematism in the understanding of architecture, its distance from the human being, and its lack of existential characteristics. This representation finds correspondence in the illustrative material — in the preference for drawings, plans, frontal point of view, and the absence of the human being in it. Atget’s images, due to the personal characteristics of their author, as well as of photography as an art form in general, reflected those characteristics of architecture which art historians overlooked, and which are related to its fundamental immersiveness and inseparable connection with the human lifeworld. Atget achieves this effect with the help of complex angles, naturalness of visual coverage, and seriality of photographs. “Unadorned” pictures of old buildings correspond to the naturalness of their aging, to actual and potential ruin as an important characteristic of architecture. On the basis of the analysis, the conclusion is reached about the need to revise the subject of architectural studies in the direction of its greater multidimensionality, inseparability from the human being, dynamism and uncertainty.