Cabaret de l'Homme Armé, Rue des Blancs-Manteaux

Eugène Atget systematically photographed traditional establishments and vernacular settings in Paris—fundamental aspects of the city under threat from new construction and industrialization. Successful before World War I as a purveyor of “Old Paris” to libraries and artists, in his final years (and posthumously) he became a cult favorite of two specific and influential sets—European Surrealists and American documentarians. Atget included this early image of a cabaret in a 1913 album of 60 images called Signs and Old Shops in Paris. He focused here equally on the emblem of “the armed man”—a title (and a tavern) dating to the medieval crusades, rendered in word and image to assure its familiarity to a partially illiterate clientele—and on the maitre d’, who gazes back through a glass window that also reflects, like a ghost, the likeness of the photographer himself.