Follow-up: My favorite French photographer
My search for Eugene Atget's grave at Cimetière de Bagneux
Have you ever heard of the book The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron? It’s a 10-week course on finding your ‘inner creative’. It helped me realize that I’ve had a lot of self-doubt with my creative projects over the years; I could never seem to finish them. There were voices in me that said, “You’re not good enough!” or “You’re not a writer!” to which I now say: au contraire.
The reason I’m telling you this is because one of the highlights of The Artist’s Way program is what Cameron calls the ‘artist’s date’. It’s when you have fun. An artist’s date can really be anything, but you do it alone and you do it for enjoyment. You take yourself out and explore a new place. You go to the movies. You buy paint, brushes, and paper and start painting. You buy silly stickers and paper and make a sticker book.
One of my more recent artist’s dates was to the Cimetière de Bagneux to find the grave of Eugène Atget. In case you didn’t have time to read my article about Eugène Atget a few weeks ago, he was a photographer around the turn of the 20th Century who documented ‘old Paris’ before it disappeared.
The cemetery at Bagneux was built to hold the graves of Parisians after the main cemeteries started to reach capacity. It’s located south of Paris, just outside the periphery. To get there, I took metro line 4 almost to the end.
The cemetery is HUGE and has an interesting array of grave sites and sections, including those for fallen French soldiers, soldiers who served under the British Empire, and the Jewish victims of deportation during WW2.
In doing my research about Atget, I learned that he was buried in Bagneux when he died in 1927. So that’s why I went on a petit adventure to find him.
As soon as I arrived, I went straight to the office that keeps track of all the burials and gravesites, to ask about Atget. The woman at the desk was very nice, though she didn’t know who Atget was. I recorded a video right afterwards about what she told me:
While it’s sad for me to know that Eugène Atget’s grave no longer exists, it was an interesting adventure to try to find him. I did go to the area where they said he was buried, even though his marker was no longer there.
One thing I will say about French cemeteries (because I also went to one in the South of France) is that they are very meditative places. The one in Bagneux is no exception. The day I went — granted it was early afternoon on a weekday — it was so quiet and peaceful. I could hear the wind in the trees and the birds chirping — a quiet place to be laid to rest.
Before you go! If you like this post, please feel free to share my site with others. My hope is to expand my network of readers who are interested in the lesser-known history and culture of France, specifically Paris. Merci!
Enjoyed reading your article for at least three reasons:
- Artist's dates are one of my favourite things from the Artist's Way :-)
- Found it Interesting to learn that Atget had such a diverse professional life before turning to the camera.
- And cemeteries are interesting places... (I've recently completed a project with photographs from victorian cemeteries in London, the Père Lachaise in Paris, and the cemetery of Prazeres in Lisbon — i'm bound to do a post about that soon). When i first visited one of the victorian cemeteries in London, it was sort of a shock to be walking in a beautiful forest filled with tombstones. Have you seen that the conservateur of the Père Lachaise has published a book on the wildlife in "his" cemetery?
Since cemeteries utilize large spaces in urban areas, it makes sense that they should be used as open spaces, like parks, but with reverence. The picture of the lane in the cemetery is a good example.