Avenue des Gobelins

Jean-Eugéne-Auguste Atget, who worked as a commercial photographer, preferred to label his pictures “document for artists” rather than works of art. From the late 1880s until his death, he numbered and sequenced thousands of his prints with an archivist’s dedication. This image of a store window on the avenue des Gobelins comes from the large series Picturesque Paris, begun in 1897. In the last decade of Atget’s career, the series swelled as he devoted more attention to photographing the city’s modern face. Man Ray and Berenice Abbott gravitated toward the elder Atget’s enigmatic views and adopted him as a forefather. Abbott purchased Atget’s negatives after his death and later sold a share of the collection to Julien Levy. As a collector and curator, Levy was instrumental in promoting Atget as an important artist—a reputation that would have come as a surprise to the photographer.