shashasha

Working in and around Paris for some 35 years, in a career that bridged the 19th and 20th centuries, Eugène Atget created an encyclopedic, idiosyncratic lived portrait of that city on the cusp of the modern era. His career began around 1890, when he hung a shingle reading, “Documents pour artistes” (Documents for artists) on a studio door in Paris’s fifth arrondissement. The sign declared his modest ambition of providing other artists with images to use as source material in their own work, and included such categories as “landscapes, animals, flowers, monuments, documents, foregrounds for painters, reproductions of paintings,” as a friend elaborated in the journal Revue des Beaux-Arts.1