Atget: Postcards of a Lost Paris

Photographer Eugène Atget is best known as a chronicler of a romantic, if disappearing, Paris around the turn of the 20th century. This book presents a series of postcards depicting Paris’s petits métiers, or little trades, exploring another side to Atget’s oeuvre. More or less Atget’s only published works during his lifetime, the postcards capture the ephemeral nature of life in the city and are part of a long tradition of depicting skilled tradespeople plying their wares. In them, Atget presents the market stands, the odd jobs, the cobbled together shops, and the informal entertainment that gave Paris its piquancy and eternally renewing liveliness.

Eugene Atget (1857–1927) was a French photographer whose photographs of the narrow streets, parks, shop windows and characters of Paris and its peripheral areas blend documentary straightforwardness with an undeniable poetic vision. Near the end of his lifetime, Atget came to the attention of Man Ray and Berenice Abbott and their avant-garde circle, becoming a source of inspiration for the Surrealists in Paris.