Eugène Atget

Using a view camera set upon a tripod and glass plate negatives, Eugène Atget made more than 8,500 photographs of Paris and its environs over a career lasting more than three decades. Wandering through his native city, he captured building facades, streetscapes, architectural details, churches, shops, parks, and the occasional monument. At the time, Paris was undergoing sweeping renovations, meant to modernize the medieval city. Atget sought out the places still relatively untouched by these modernizing forces. His photographs serve, in part, as a record of old Paris.

Atget’s style of photography differed from the prevailing taste at the time. His photographs were generally in sharp focus, unlike those of his Pictorialist contemporaries. Though his modest purpose when making photographs was to create documents for other artists and craftsmen to use for their art—the sign outside of his studio read, “Documents pour artistes” (“Documents for artists”)—the trove of photographs he left behind testify to his own artistic talent.