About this work
In 1890–91 Eugène Atget advertised his photography as a supplier of images for artists and craftsmen: ‘Documents pour Artistes’. This required images that were direct, providing artists with details from which to model their work. Over time, Atget came to focus almost exclusively on documenting the effects of Baron Haussmann’s large-scale renovation of Paris, which took place between 1853 and 1870. Atget continued to use nineteenth-century technologies, notably a large glass-plate camera and albumen silver papers, well into the twentieth century. The resulting photographs have a stillness and appear both of their time and otherworldly. Atget amassed an extraordinary archive of over eight thousand negatives, arranged into subjects and categories.