Boulevard de Strasbourg (Corsets)

For almost three decades, the former actor Eugene Atget systematically, often serially, documented everything about Paris that seemed to be vanishing with the encroachments of modernization. Impeccably composed, with rich and varied textures and forms, his images range from unpeopled streets, parks, and monuments to cafes, street vendors, and shop windows. In Boulevard de Strasbourg (Corsets), rows of hourglass-shaped busts emerge out of darkness, while a dangling corset swings in the cracked doorway, animating the entire scene (Atget's old-fashioned camera often recorded moving objects as blurred). Atget sold these cultural documents for modest sums to artists, craftspeople, and institutions interested in preserving the past. It was not until after 1925, when his work was publicized by the expatriate American artists Man Ray and Berenice Abbott, that his photographs began to be recognized by a wider art world.