Eugène Atget

Eugène Atget (1857–1927) was a French photographer whose meticulous images of old Paris provided the foundation for 20th‑century documentary and fine‑art photography. Born in Libourne, he moved to Paris in 1878 intending to become an actor before turning to photography around 1898. Self‑taught and armed with a large‑format view camera, Atget set out to record the rapidly disappearing streets, shopfronts, and parks of the city’s medieval quarters.

Over the next three decades he produced more than 10,000 glass‑plate negatives, capturing everything from weathered façades and hidden courtyards to street vendors and ornamental ironwork—always with soft, even lighting that revealed texture and atmosphere. Though his work was little known in his lifetime, he sold prints to artists and institutions, notably supplying Surrealists like Man Ray and Berenice Abbott with reference images for their own experiments.

Atget’s dedication to systematic documentation—what he called his “Vieux Paris” series—preserved a vanishing cityscape and influenced generations of photographers and urban historians. After his death in 1927, Berenice Abbott helped bring his work to wider attention, ensuring that his unassuming studies of streets and storefronts would become celebrated exemplars of photography’s power to record and transform the familiar.