Jean Eugene Auguste Atget, among the first of photogs social documenters, has come to be regarded as one of the medium's major figures. His images of Paris are perhaps the most vivid record of a city ever made. Atget took no portraits per se, but he did photograph street characters: peddlers, garbage collectors, road workers, and so on. His friend Andre Calmette wrote that Atget set out to photograph "everything in Paris and its environs that was artistic and picturesque." In recording the daily appearance of a rapidly changing Paris, Atget made methodical surveys of the old quarters of the city. He was to make over 10,000 photographs of this immense subject in the next 30 years using obsolete equipment: an 18 X 24 cm bellows camera, rectilinear lenses, a wooden tripod, and a few plate holders. The quiet, even understated, appreciation of a subject's beauty in Atget's work has led many to consider him naive, a primitive. In truth, his work is marked by a purity of vision, a refusal of painterly rhetoric, and a deceptive simplicity.' height= Eugene Atget: Pont-Neuf. Hiver, 1923
Pont-Neuf. Hiver, 1923