Versailles, Le Poème Satyrique, 1923

Eugène Atget was famously embraced by Man Ray and the Surrealists in the 1920s. These artists were fascinated and inspired by Atget’s employment of the seemingly objective, factual nature of photography to generate mysterious, evocative and theatrical images. To the Surrealists, this particular process of sublimation became the foundation of modern photography. Atget became most explicitly associated with André Breton’s movement in 1926 when three of his photographs appeared in the La Révolution Surréaliste magazine founded by Man Ray.
The sculpture in this photograph is Le Poème satirique created by Philippe de Buyster (1595−1688) in the years between 1675 and 1681. Atget’s use of framing and vantage point creates a dreamlike image, wherein the figure appears both animate and hundreds of years old, frozen within the grounds Versailles.