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Piercing Time examines the role of photography in documenting urban change by juxtaposing contemporary 'rephotographs' taken by the author with images of nineteenth-century Paris taken by Charles Marville, who worked under Georges Haussmann, and corresponding photographs by Eugène Atget taken in the early twentieth century. Revisiting the sites of Marville's photographs with a black cloth, tripod and view camera, Peter Sramek creates here a visually stunning book that investigates how urban development, the use of photography as a documentary medium and the representation of urban space reflect attitudes towards the city. The essays that run alongside these fascinating images discuss subjects such as the aesthetics of ruins and the documentation of the demolitions that preceded Haussmannization, as well as the different approaches taken by Marville and Atget to their work. The book also includes contemporary interviews with local Parisians, extracts from Haussmann's own writing and historical maps that allow for an intriguing look at the shifting city plan. Sure to be of interest to lovers of the city, be they Parisians or visitors, Piercing Time provides a unique snapshot of historical changes of the past 150 years. But it will also be of enduring value to scholars. The accurate cataloguing and high quality reproductions of the images make it a resource for a significant portion of the Marville collection in the Musée Carnavalet, and it will aid further research in urban history and change in Paris over the past century and a half. Photographers will be drawn to the book for its new thinking in relation to documentary methodologies.

MOMA's four Atget exhibitions are the occasion for this clarification of the French photographer's documentary intentions

Both in their lives and in their productions, the Frenchman Jean Eugène Auguste Atget and the American Man Ray are at poles, for one lived a nearly anonymous existence and practiced straight photography, while the other enjoyed fame and pursued experimental imagery with and without camera. Atget's avowed objective was to produce only documents, while Man Ray deliberately sought something beyond the type of representation associated with the photographic process. Yet, Man Ray collected Atget photographs and got several of them published in La Révolution Surréaliste, the first official review of the Surrealists.

So little happens in Atget photographs that virtually any one of them could be used as a paradigm of Conceptualism. Ansel Adams called them \"emotionally clean records of a rare and subtle perception\" and \"perhaps the earliest expression of true photographic art.\" John Szarkowski thought his work unique as both \"a catalogue of the fruits of French culture, as it survived in and near Paris in the first quarter of this century\" and as a \"benchmark against which much of the most sophisticated contemporary photography measures itself.\" [EUGENE ATGET] himself could pass as a contemporary, except that he seems not to strive for anonymity but rather to lose himself in the task of documentation, much like a naive painter. When focusing on the same subject, the photographer's English contemporary Frederick Evans is a raving Romantic by comparison. Nevertheless, there is occasional relief from the pressure of Atget's serenity -- in details like disarranged carpets and in the oddly angled shot of a Pieta. Though it is possible that the sculpture was on a pedestal too high for the photographer to ascend, Mr. [Andrew Szegedy-Maszak] sees the image as close to a \"rude joke\" and notes that the Atget scholar Maria Hambourg has shown his philosophy to have been \"aggressively modernist, secular and freethinking.\"

The \"old-age style\" is quite rare among photographers (who, after all, have not had as many innings in history as painters have), but it is clearly identifiable in the work of Eugene Atget (1857-1927). \"Atget's Magical Analysis: Photographs, 1915-1927,\" recently at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, was the first museum exhibition devoted to this aspect of his work. Thirty pictures by no means exhaust the accomplishments of his later years, but they do give a satisfying glimpse into the mind of a man as he contemplated eternity on his ground glass. (A smaller show of Atget's work from all periods is at the Zabriskie Gallery in Manhattan, through Feb. 15.) \"Atget's Magical Analysis\" ingeniously juxtaposes prints of the same subject, revealing how large a difference a photographer can make by merely moving a step or adjusting the print process. Two nearly identical images from St.-Cloud hang side by side: across a basin, statues of the gods, reduced by distance to stone toys on pedestals, stand beneath the swelling shapes of trees along a formal allee. Although part of the Museum of Modern Art's retrospective exhibition traveled to San Francisco in 1983, Atget had been effectively invisible in the Los Angeles area. Weston Naef, curator of photographs at the Getty, says that until this show no Atget collection had been on view in the region since he arrived in 1984.

In the two exhibitions, then, Atget is shown both ways: as primitive and as pioneer, as the tradesman photographer whose business provided ''Documents pour Artistes'' and as a genius of esthetic discovery unrecognized until after his death. But Mr. [John Szarkowski], having long championed Atget's case, clearly is most concerned with giving the photographer a preeminent position within his own rubric of 20th-century photography. Consequently, in the essay that accompanies the book ''The Work of Atget: Modern Times'' (Museum of Modern Art, $45), he devotes most of his space to describing how Atget's work was received by the next generation of photographers. He argues, albeit in an elliptical, tentative way, that the photographs of Atget directly influenced those of such primary American Modernists as Berenice Abbott, Ansel Adams, Walker Evans and Edward Weston. Except in the case of Miss Abbott, who saved the bulk of Atget's work and was quite obviously taken by it, this influence is not so easy to see. Of Adams's reaction to Atget Mr. Szarkowski says, ''There is in Adams's pictures of the 30's a quality of tact and modesty before the prior claims of his subject matter, a reluctance to reshape the world too roughly to make it serve the needs of grand design, that perhaps expresses in his own art what he loved, when still in his 20's, in Atget.'' The facts are, of course, that Adams went on to make the world ''serve the needs of grand design'' in an extreme fashion, so Atget's influence seems, as best, retroactive. In discussing Evans's reaction to seeing Atget prints for the first time, Mr. Szarkowski concedes that Evans had already arrived at the beginnings of his own transparent, frontal style, and that Atget's work may merely have served as a ''confirmation'' of his path. What makes Atget great also involves what he managed to say with this synthesis, and what it means to us today. His unmatched ability to express a sense of loss in the face of an increasingly machine-oriented, homogenized, rapidly paced world surely offers as much solace now as it did 75 years ago. More than any other photographer, he makes explicit photography's ability to render all things nostalgic, so that the past seems to ache in us. This is true even of the automobiles he photographed, which were ''modern'' in their time. As the French critic Roland Barthes noted in his last book, ''Camera Lucida,'' a photograph's inescapable evidence of ''having been there'' leads one inevitably to a poignant awareness of death. Nowhere is this demonstrated more convincingly than in Atget's pictures of the gardens of Sceaux, where the tangled vines, overgrown weeds and fallen statues we see are, like photographs themselves, metaphors of what cannot be repossessed.

Although merely a moderately successful commercial photographer in his time, Jean-Eugene-Auguste Atget is regarded today as a figure of great importance among photographers and urban preservationists. Atget photographed the architecture and features of turn-of-the-century Paris, working tirelessly to produce an archive of some 10,000 images.

Richard Locke reviews the book \"Atget's Seven Albums,\" a provocative study of the French photographer Eugene Atget by Molly Nesbit.