It is very interesting to note that between the end of ‘800 and the beginning of ‘900 we have passed from a purely technical use of the photographic medium to a documentary and more subjective one as that produced by Eugène Atget, able to create a specific identity and recognizability thanks to its stylistic style, through a large collection of photographs of buildings and construction details that would normally have been overlooked.
The figure of Eugène Atget is very important in my reasoning because in his work are found, for the first time, typical features of architectural photography, as the attention paid to vertical (always straight), the focus on the architectural element and its details, the almost total absence of the human figure, present only to make readable the proportions of the architectural subject and the documentation work of a world undergoing rapid change demonstrated through the storage of buildings that, From there soon, they would disappear to leave room for a new architecture daughter of an aesthetic and technological renewal that pushed to find its spaces.
From the first photography ever made, by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1826, the experimentation in the field of photography was purely scientific, oriented to the search for new elements to improve the process of impression and fixation of the image, no one devoted themselves to the social implications of this discovery until 1931 when Walter Benjamin published in the magazine “Die literarische Welt” the series of three texts entitled ‘Little history of photography” with which the philosopher identifies the themes and research that move photography from the early daguerreotypes to his contemporaries, interweaving his story with a theoretical debate on the links between art and photography, still today of great relevance. It is for this reason that the work of Eugène Atget (prior to Benjamin’s writings) is to be considered as a precursor with regard to awareness in the use of the photographic medium as a means of identity and authorship.