Sex-Workers, Street Traders, Mannequins; Eugène Atget Photographed Them All On The Streets Of Paris
- Daniel Holland
- Jun 30, 2023
- 6 min read
On quiet Paris mornings, before the cafés raised their shutters and before traffic asserted itself, a solitary figure moved slowly through the streets with a large wooden camera and a heavy tripod. He paused not at monuments, but at doorways, shop windows, corners, and empty streets still holding the imprint of recent life. What he was recording was not spectacle but disappearance. The man was Eugène Atget, and the photographs he made would become one of the most comprehensive visual records of Paris at the moment it slipped from one century into another.
An indirect path to photography
Atget was born on 12th February, 1857, in Libourne, a small town in south western France. Orphaned young, he was raised by relatives and spent much of his early adult life searching for a profession. He worked as a sailor, trained as an actor, and later studied painting at the École des Beaux Arts. None of these paths provided stability, but each shaped the way he later approached photography. Acting sharpened his awareness of posture and presence. Painting trained his eye for balance and surface. Life at sea fostered patience and self reliance.
It was only in the late 1880s, already in middle age by the standards of the time, that Atget turned seriously to photography. By the turn of the twentieth century, he had committed himself almost entirely to documenting Paris, moving methodically through its streets with what contemporaries often described as obsessive focus.
Paris remade and the pull of vieux Paris
Atget’s timing was critical. Paris was still living with the consequences of Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s nineteenth century modernisation programme. Haussmannisation had swept away large areas of medieval Paris, replacing narrow streets with broad boulevards, uniform façades, and new parks. The process was efficient, monumental, and necessarily destructive.
By the late nineteenth century, this transformation had sparked a growing cultural fixation on vieux Paris, the idea of an older city that existed before modern planning, traffic systems, and commercial signage. Atget’s work emerged directly from this atmosphere. His photographs of narrow alleys, small courtyards, street labourers, and informal trades can be read as a quiet counter archive to Haussmann’s vision.
Early images such as street pavers, rag pickers, and street musicians, photographed in the late 1890s, reveal his attention to forms of labour already slipping out of view. These were not nostalgic scenes staged for effect. They were records of everyday survival in a city that was reorganising itself at speed.
The flâneur with a purpose
Atget’s working life closely aligned with the figure of the flâneur, articulated by Charles Baudelaire in his 1863 essay The Painter of Modern Life. Baudelaire described the flâneur as someone who wandered the modern city without destination, open to chance, observation, and fleeting impressions.
“For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator,” Baudelaire wrote, “it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude.”
Atget walked Paris in precisely this way, but with a camera as his reason for stopping. He wandered until something arrested him, a prostitute waiting in a doorway, a waiter standing at a threshold, a shop window filled with mannequins, or a street temporarily emptied of people. His Paris often appears strangely still, not because it lacked life, but because he worked early in the morning, when movement had left its traces but not yet returned.
This openness to involuntary memory echoes the literary Paris of Marcel Proust, who lived and wrote in the city during Atget’s lifetime. Like a Proustian madeleine, Atget’s images trigger recollection through ordinary details rather than dramatic events.
Sex Workers and Marginal Lives
One of the most revealing aspects of Atget’s work is his sustained attention to people at the edges of respectability. Sex workers appear repeatedly in his photographs, standing alone or in small groups, framed by doorways or street corners. Images made on rue Asselin and around Boulevard de la Chapelle in the early 1920s show women looking directly at the camera, neither posed nor hidden.
Atget did not sensationalise these encounters. They sit alongside photographs of hawkers, labourers, and shopkeepers, forming part of a broader record of working life. In doing so, he produced some of the most straightforward visual documents of prostitution in early twentieth century Paris, free of moralising or melodrama.
Documents pour artistes
Atget never described himself as an artist. His calling card from around 1900 read, “E. Atget, Creator, and Purveyor of a Collection of Photographic Views of Old Paris.” He conceived his work as documents pour artistes, practical resources for painters, sculptors, and designers.
This intention shaped both his subject matter and his extraordinary discipline. After making a photograph, Atget developed, washed, and fixed the negative himself. Each negative was assigned a consecutive number, written in graphite on the verso and scratched into the emulsion. Prints were contact printed only, never enlarged, ensuring that every photograph remained the same size as its negative.
He printed using commercially available albumen and gelatin silver printing out papers. Negatives were clamped into printing frames and exposed to sunlight, allowing him to inspect progress until the image reached the desired density. Prints were then washed, fixed, and gold toned, following standard practice of the period. Finished prints were numbered in pencil and inserted into albums using corner slits rather than adhesive.
Albums were organised both chronologically and by theme, with additional volumes assembled according to subjects likely to interest clients, architecture, shopfronts, street trades, gardens, or figures.
Poverty, principle, and absolute control
For much of his life, Atget lived in extreme poverty. For around twenty years, he reportedly survived largely on milk, bread, and sugar, claiming that all other foods were poison. Whether belief or necessity, the regime reflected his severe self discipline.
This rigidity was noted by Berenice Abbott, who encountered Atget in the 1920s.
“In art and hygiene he was absolute,” Abbott wrote. “He had very personal ideas on everything which he imposed with extraordinary violence.”
That intransigence shaped his photographs. He resisted artistic fashion, ignored emerging modernist aesthetics, and continued to work with large format equipment long after smaller cameras became available.
War, loss, and a late shift
The First World War interrupted Atget’s work. He stored much of his archive in his basement for safekeeping and almost entirely stopped photographing. Valentine, his long term partner, lost her son Léon at the front, a personal loss that marked the period deeply.
Between 1920 and 1921, Atget sold thousands of negatives to institutions, finally achieving a degree of financial independence. In his final years, he turned his attention to photographing the parks of Versailles, Saint Cloud, and Sceaux, while also producing his late series of sex workers.
Valentine died in 1926. In 1927, shortly before his own death on 04th August, 1927, Abbott photographed Atget in a series of portraits, describing him as slightly stooped, tired, remote, and appealing.
Atget did not live to see the full recognition of his work. During his lifetime, his photographs attracted the attention of Surrealists, who published them in La Révolution surréaliste in 1926, drawn to their deserted streets, stairways, and uncanny shop windows.
After his death, Abbott became his most committed advocate. She purchased a substantial portion of his archive, promoted his work through exhibitions and publications, and eventually sold her collection to the Museum of Modern Art in 1968. The archive, comprising thousands of prints and glass plate negatives, became foundational to Atget’s international reputation.
American photographers such as Walker Evans and Lee Friedlander absorbed Atget’s clarity and restraint into their own work. In 1931, Ansel Adams described Atget’s prints as “direct and emotionally clean records” and among the earliest expressions of true photographic art.
A methodical witness to disappearance
Atget’s photographs are neither sentimental nor theatrical. They are careful, repetitive, and patient. Taken together, they form an archive of a city reshaped by modernisation and loss. He did not attempt to stop change, only to record what existed before it vanished.
Paris moved on. Atget walked slowly. And in that deliberate pace, he left behind one of the most enduring visual histories of urban life ever assembled.
