My Favorite French Photographer: Capturing old Paris — Part Two
My search for Eugene Atget’s grave at Cimetière de Bagneux, Paris
Have you ever heard of the book The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron?
I’m telling you this 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 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 month ago, he was a photographer around the turn of the 20th Century who documented ‘old Paris’ before it disappeared.
The cemetery at Bagneux
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.
While researching 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 afterward about what she told me:
I will say that French cemeteries (because I also went to one in the South of France) 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.
One of the beautiful tree-lined alleys of the Cimetière de Bagneux
Do you know of Eugène Atget’s photography? Have you ever been to the Cimetière de Bagneux? Please share your experiences in the comments.
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About the Contributor
Jennifer Bragg
