Atget's photography was a photography of the city of Paris, which he carried out for over 30 years producing in that time over 10,000 photographs. If Charles Marville, his predecessor, first made images of those districts and streets about to be destroyed to make way for Haussmann’s boulevards, then Agtet's photography of place was doing something with light, space and time that Marville does not.

Atget has become a very ‘authored’ photographer – there are a number of ‘Atgets’. The surrealists appropriation of Atget's work constructed him as a primitive in touch with his unconscious self. Atget has since come to serve as the unconscious of documentary photograph--- a product of his reception in the history of photography in the United States--- the forebear to the generation of documentary art photographers --photographers like Walker Evans, Robert Adams, Diane Arbus, William Eggleston, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand.

Atget is part of the canon of photography because of the work of Szarkowski and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, who produced am romantic ‘Atget’ of their own with the four volume---Old France, The Art of Old Paris, The Ancien Regime and Modern Times----selected from his photographic archive ---the Seven Albums into which Atget had placed selected prints ( eg., ‘Zoniers’, Fortifications). Szarkowsk Atget is a late Atget, one freed from commercial considerations, who strives for artistic effect and for personal expression.

Atget is a photographer who delimits the essence of ‘place’ in the way of the passing of place into memory.