Eugène Atget, the Paris that was
« French photographer (1857-1927), who photographed nearly 8,000 views of "old Paris" threatened by Haussmann. »
A failed actor and failed painter, Eugène Atget took up photography at 41 to produce "documents for artists" — images that could serve as models for urban-landscape painters. For thirty years, on foot, with an 18x24 view camera on a tripod, he walked Paris at dawn, when the streets were empty.
Courtyards, shop windows, fortifications, itinerant trades, bourgeois interiors, prostitutes: he photographed everything Haussmann had not yet pulled down. His main client was the city of Paris itself, which bought some of his prints. No one thought him an artist — except, at the very end, the Surrealists.
Berenice Abbott met him in 1925, photographed him in 1927 a few months before his death, and bought a large part of his negatives and prints, tirelessly promoting them. Without her, Atget would have remained an anonymous supplier. MoMA now holds a major part of his archive.