In Conversation - The Making of a Reputation

Join us at ICP as David Campany, Creative Director and curator of Eugene Atget: The Making of a Reputation, is joined in conversation by scholars Andres Zervigon and Maria Antonella Pelizzari to discuss the lives of Atget’s images through magazines.

This program is being offered both in person at ICP, located on NYC's Lower East Side, and online. Tickets to attend the conversation in person are $5 and do not include access to ICP’s galleries. 

Add on admission to the museum and arrive early to see our current exhibitions HARD COPY NEW YORK, on view through May 4, 2026.

About the Exhibition

The International Center of Photography presents Eugène Atget: The Making of a Reputation, curated by ICP’s creative director David Campany. This exhibition takes a new approach to the story of Atget’s career, drawing particular attention to the role that Berenice Abbott played in shaping Atget’s posthumous rise in influence.

About Eugène Atget

Eugène Atget (1857-1927) was a French photographer best known for his photographs of Paris and its environs. He supplied studies for painters, architects, and stage designers, while also making formally complex pictures. Atget’s subjects included everything from grand buildings to typical street scenes, storefronts and workers. His photographs, often taken in the early hours, are notable for their diffuse light and wide views that give a sense of enigma and mystery. They also document Paris and its rapid changes; many of the areas Atget photographed were soon to be razed as part of widespread modernization projects.

Atget drew the admiration of a variety of artists, most notably Man Ray who even used one of Atget’s photographs on the cover of the magazine La Révolution surréaliste. The photographer Berenice Abbott preserved many of Atget’s prints and negatives. She exhibited his work, wrote about it, and for decades championed Atget as a forerunner of modern photography.
 

Eugène Atget, Vaux-de-Cernay, 1908–10 (printed 1908–27). International Center of Photography, Gift of Caryl and Israel Englander, 2009 (2009.79.49

About the Speakers

David Campany is Creative Director of the International Center of Photography, New York. He has worked worldwide with institutions including MoMA New York, Tate, Whitechapel Gallery London, Centre Pompidou, Le Bal Paris, ICP New York, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, The Photographer’s Gallery London, ParisPhoto, PhotoLondon, The National Portrait Gallery London, Aperture, Steidl, MIT Press, Thames & Hudson, MACK and Friez.

Maria Antonella Pelizzari is Professor of the History of Photography at Hunter College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the author of Photography and Italy (Reaktion, 2011) and co-editor of The Idea of Italy (YCBA 2022). She has worked curatorially at the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montréal (Traces of India: Photography, Architecture, and the Politics of Representation, 2003), and has served in the Hunter Curatorial Certificate (Peripheral Visions, 2012; Framing Community: Magnum Photos, 2017; 125th Street: Photography in Harlem, 2022). She has published on illustrated periodicals in Modernism/Modernity (2019), the Journal of Modern Italian Studies (2015), Bruno Munari. The Lightness of Art (Peter Lang, 2017); Magazines and Modern Identities (Bloomsbury, 2023), and has co-edited with Andrés Zérvigon Print Matters: Media and Modernity in Illustrated Magazines, 1910-1970 (2025). Her current book project, under review, is Distracting Fascism. Photography in Angelo Rizzoli’s Illustrated Periodicals (1927-1938).

Andrés Mario Zervigón is Professor of the History of Photography at Rutgers University, and Co-Editor in Chief of the journal History of Photography. He is author of John Heartfield and the Agitated Image (2012) and Photography and Germany (2017). With Tanya Sheehan he edited Photography and Its Origins (2014), with Sabine Kriebel Photography and Doubt (2017), with Donna Gustafson Subjective-Objective: A Century of Social Photography (2017) and with Antonella Pelizzari Print Matters: Media and Modernity in Illustrated Magazines, 1910-1970 (2025). His current book project is a history of the radical weekly Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung, for which he received a CASVA Senior Fellowship (2013-14). Zervigón leads The Developing Room, an academic working group at Rutgers devoted to photography studies.

Header Image: Eugène Atget, Pontoise, Place du Grand Martroy, 1902 (printed 1919–27). International Center of Photography, Gift of Caryl and Israel Englander, 2008 (2008.111.46