Atget, Eugène (özhĕn` ätzhĕ`), 1857–1927, French photographer. After working as a sailor and then as an actor for many years, Atget became a photographer at the age of 42. He began at once to produce his detailed visual record of Paris and its environs, particularly St. Cloud and Versailles. Atget made his living by selling his images of the city to painters for use as source material, and later to the Parisian historical monuments society. In making his photographs of the parks, lakes, shop windows, vendors, prostitutes, ragpickers, buildings, flower markets, sculpture gardens, doorways, bridges, and street scenes of Paris, Atget went beyond documentation. His quiet, reflective, and poetic images are dramatic with the force of time gone by. A large number of his many thousands of pictures are in the Museum of Modern Art, New York City. Atget's work was published and brought to international attention by the photographer Berenice Abbott Abbott, Berenice (bĕr'ənēs`), 1898–1991, American photographer, b. Springfield, Ohio.
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Bibliography

See A. D. Trottenberg, ed., A Vision of Paris: The Photographs of Eugène Atget (1963); B. Abbott, The World of Atget (1964); J. Szarkowski and M. M. Hambourg, The Work of Atget (4 vol., 1985); J. Szarkowsky, Eugène Atget (2000).

Atget, (Jean-) Eugène (-Auguste)

(born Feb. 12, 1857, Libourne, near Bordeaux, France—died Aug. 4, 1927, Paris) French photographer. He began his adult life as an itinerant actor. Around age 30 he settled in Paris and became a photographer. The rest of Atget's life was spent recording everything he could that he considered picturesque or artistic in and around Paris. With an eye for strange and unsettling images, he made several series of photographs of iron grillwork, fountains, statues, and trees. He also photographed shop fronts, store windows, and poor tradespeople. His main clients were museums and historical societies that bought his photographs of historic buildings and monuments. After World War I he received a commission to document the brothels of Paris. Man Ray published four of Atget's photographs in La révolution surréaliste (1926), the only recognition he received in his lifetime. After his death, Ray, Berenice Abbott, and the art dealer Julien Lévy bought his remaining collection, which is now in the Museum of Modern Art.