Magasin, Avenue des Gobelins

Eugène Atget observed and photographed the interpenetrating planes and reflections of Paris shop windows during his regular early-morning excursions. Their complex and subtle ambiguities captured the attention of many Surrealist artists of the time, who praised Atget’s extraordinary and magically evocative images. Dismissing their extravagant compliments, he insisted that he was simply producing records of the city he so loved. At an early point in life, Atget was drawn to theater, and that sensibility apparently had a lasting effect on his ability to invest his photographs with an uncanny sense of a stage empty of its actors.