Eugène Atget

After working as an actor, Atget began photographing around 1888. By 1890, he was producing reference photographs of plants, landscapes, and objects for painters. In 1897, he began systematically photographing Paris, expanding his subjects to streets, churches, private residences, courtyards, stairways, shops, street vendors, interiors, and suburban gardens.^*8 His stated purposes survive in signs, letters, ledgers, and sales records. By about 1891, the sign “Documents pour artistes” identified his business as the sale of reference photographs to painters, architects, and artisans.^*23 According to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, more than 8,000 negatives were organized under categories such as “Parisian Interiors,” “Vehicles in Paris,” and “Petits métiers” (small trades).^*1 The handwritten ledger Répertoire, held by MoMA, preserves evidence of how Atget managed subjects and negative numbers.^*22 Before Atget, Charles Marville photographed the same city as the official photographer of Paris from 1862 onward, documenting streets threatened by redevelopment and the new infrastructure that replaced them under a municipal commission.^*10 Atget’s work began as a private commercial enterprise and developed, through sustained photography, classification, and sales to public institutions, into a collection of Old Paris.

Classification and Repetition: Organizing Documents into Urban Series

Classification by subject and the repeated photographing of similar motifs formed the basis of Atget’s method. In the album Documents pour l’histoire du Vieux Paris at the J. Paul Getty Museum, individual photographs are assembled as a body of documents “for the history of Old Paris.”^*18 Paris Musées places his inventory-like sequences of door knockers and horse-drawn vehicles alongside photographs attentive to mist, light, and reflection, presenting both as parts of the same body of work.^*4 Repeated photographs of courtyards, stairways, and shopfronts allow viewers to compare differences in entrance widths, paving, walls, displays, and the direction of light from place to place. This structure of classification and repetition underlies The Met’s description of Atget’s photographs as a visual compendium of the architecture, landscapes, and artifacts of French culture.^*1

From “Documents for Artists” to a “Collection of Old Paris”

The surviving materials reveal two aims: the sale of reference photographs and the preservation of a collection. His “documents for artists” sign, photographs of plants, landscapes, and architectural details, and subject-based albums show that he supplied images as reusable visual references.^*3 In a letter sent to arts administrator Paul Léon on November 12, 1920, Atget explained that for more than twenty years, “through my own work and personal initiative,” he had gathered artistic documents on urban architecture from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Of the completed artistic and documentary collection, he wrote, “I can say that I possess all of Old Paris.”^*23 In the same letter, he expressed concern that the negative collection might pass into the hands of someone who did not understand its value and be lost, and he sought its preservation by a public institution.^*21 After selling part of his negatives on the art and architecture of Old Paris to the French government in 1920, he continued to photograph. Conservation research describes this later phase as a period in which he worked for his own pleasure, apart from commercial constraints.^*23 Atget’s practical aims and the later interpretations of his work in terms of emptiness, dream, and modernity belong to different historical moments.

Changing Light and Time of Day

ICP identifies diffuse early-morning light and a broad field of view as characteristic features of Atget’s photographs.^*2 The J. Paul Getty Museum also describes Atget walking through Paris at dawn to photograph streets, shopfronts, architectural ornament, stairways, and street trades.^*5 Conservation research on MoMA’s holdings notes that Atget also worked in bright daylight when clear detail was required for reference purposes, while in his later years he increasingly chose early-morning and evening light.^*23 Although many photographs show sparsely populated streets, Atget also photographed street vendors, laborers, sex workers, and spectators. When people appear, they are recorded in a way that keeps their occupation, location, surrounding architecture, and street surface legible. Working with an 18 × 24 cm glass plate and a tripod required a deliberate framing process that could register architecture and urban detail at once. MoMA describes his contact-printing process, in which the glass negative and sensitized paper were pressed together and exposed to sunlight.^*6

Streets, Courtyards, and Stairways: The Continuity of Urban Space

In the early St. Étienne du Mont, rue de la Montagne Sainte Geneviève, the sloping road, building facades, and street leading toward the church are recorded as a single space. The National Gallery of Art identifies it as an albumen print made in 1898.^*16 The 1912 photograph 22 rue Quincampoix, cour directs the eye through a narrow entrance toward the rear of the courtyard, holding walls, doorways, paving stones, and domestic objects within the same frame.^*13 Frontal views of buildings coexist with photographs that use the depth of alleys and stairways. The city appears both as an inventory of structures and as a sequence of spaces traversed on foot. SFMOMA’s collection list likewise ranges across churches, streets, canals, shops, bridges, and châteaux, confirming that Atget’s subjects extended from monumental architecture to everyday labor and the urban periphery.^*12

Shop-Window Reflections and Surrealist Reception

The 1925 photograph Magasin, Avenue des Gobelins shows mannequins and merchandise behind the window overlaid with reflections of the buildings, trees, and sky across the street. The NGA object page also notes the street scene reflected in the glass.^*15 Reflection brings interior and street onto a single plane, recording commercial display and cityscape at once. Atget made these photographs as documents, while Man Ray and the Surrealists approached them from a different position. According to The Met, the photographs published at Man Ray’s suggestion in La Révolution surréaliste in 1926—deserted streets and shopfronts with mannequins among them—were received as images of Paris as the “capital of dreams,” where memory and desire intersect.^*24 The 1912 photograph Pendant l’éclipse was among the published works and shows a crowd from behind as they look up at a solar eclipse.^*14

Gardens, Mist, and Water: Light in the Late Work

Atget’s subjects extended beyond streets to the gardens of Saint-Cloud, Sceaux, Versailles, and the Luxembourg Gardens. In works including the Getty Museum’s Parc de Saint-Cloud, statues, stairs, water, and trees describe both the structure of the historic garden and the conditions of light.^*19 MoMA presents the photographs made after World War I, especially the group produced in the Parc de Sceaux in the spring of 1925, as an important body of late work.^*3 In the garden photographs, the spatial relations among architecture and sculpture remain clear, while mist, backlighting, reflections on water, and overlapping branches also remain visible. Paris Musées treats Atget’s inventory-like documentation and his responsiveness to mist, light, and reflection as two aspects of the same work.^*4

St. Étienne du Mont, rue de la Montagne Sainte Geneviève

St. Étienne du Mont, rue de la Montagne Sainte Geneviève (1898) does not isolate the church as a monument. It records the site as part of a street space that includes the hill and adjacent houses. The NGA record also lists the inventory number on the reverse, confirming that the print formed part of a classified body of documents.^*16

22 rue Quincampoix, cour

22 rue Quincampoix, cour (1912) brings a narrow passage leading into the courtyard, and the layered doorways, walls, and paving beyond it, into a single frame. MoMA holds the work as an albumen print from the Abbott-Levy Collection; the object page provides the image, date, medium, and provenance.^*13

Magasin, Avenue des Gobelins

Magasin, Avenue des Gobelins (1925) records mannequins, merchandise, price tags, and reflections from the street within a single image. The NGA object page can be enlarged to examine the display inside the shop and the reflected buildings, trees, and sky.^*15 The series of shop-window photographs later became a central focus of the Surrealists’ reception of Atget.^*24

18 × 24 cm Glass Plates and Contact Prints

Atget used 18 × 24 cm glass plates and a large-format view camera, producing contact prints by placing the negative directly against the photographic paper. Conservation research shows that he used several types of paper, including albumen paper and gelatin printing-out paper, followed by washing, fixing, and toning.^*23 MoMA states that Atget made at least 8,500 photographs between 1898 and 1927.^*13 The National Gallery of Art’s artist page makes fifty-eight works available online, allowing comparison of dates, media, and images.^*11

Man Ray and Surrealism

In the 1920s, the Surrealists encountered Atget’s photographs of Old Paris through Man Ray, who worked nearby. In 1926, several works, including Pendant l’éclipse, appeared without the photographer’s name in La Révolution surréaliste.^*14 What drew their attention were deserted streets, shopfronts with mannequins, and reflections that overlaid the street and its merchandise. The Met explains that these photographs were received as images of Paris as the “capital of dreams,” an urban labyrinth where memory and desire intersect.^*24 Man Ray’s selection and publication of the photographs helped move works that had circulated as reference documents into a Surrealist context.

Walker Evans and the American Vernacular

Walker Evans and Atget are connected through their frontal records of shopfronts, signs, hand lettering, and ordinary objects. The Met links Evans’s interest in commercial and hand-painted signs, seen in Votive Candles, New York City, to the influence of Atget’s shop-window photographs as they were valued by the Surrealists.^*25 The museum further explains that Evans formed a new photographic language from the American vernacular through a comprehensive record of ordinary urban things. Atget’s shopfronts are identified as one of his early points of reference.

Henri Cartier-Bresson and Early Paris

Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson notes that the young Henri Cartier-Bresson attempted to emulate Atget in his early work.^*8 In another text, the Fondation describes how, after an early phase shaped by Atget and the Surrealists, Cartier-Bresson turned from the 1930s onward to the ways people moved through and occupied the streets of Paris.^*26 Their connection is grounded in Cartier-Bresson’s documented use of Atget as an early reference, as well as their shared subject of Paris.

Berenice Abbott and Institutional Preservation

Berenice Abbott met Atget through Man Ray and photographed his portrait in 1927. After Atget’s death, she and Julien Levy acquired the remaining prints and negatives, and for more than forty years she promoted the work through exhibitions, publications, and writing.^*7 The Met’s Boutique, Marché aux Halles, Paris is cataloged as a print made by Abbott around 1929 from a 1925 negative, providing one example of the work’s posthumous preservation and reprinting.^*17 In 1968, MoMA acquired 1,415 glass negatives and about 8,000 vintage prints, assuming responsibility for their preservation, classification, exhibition, and study.^*9 MoMA currently publishes records for 2,996 works.^*20 Atget’s reputation today took shape through several stages: the functional urban collection he created, the Surrealists’ selection of particular images, Abbott’s preservation and publication, and the collecting and research undertaken by museums.