In Canon Fodder: Authoring Eugène Atget Abigail Solomon-Godeau focuses her attention on how Atget is both currently and historically represented in our photographic culture. This is a fit between the requirements of late modernist photographic theory (requirements that are institutional, canonical, and discursive in nature) and Atget's work.

MOMA's interpretation of Atget is someone who reconciled the medium's documentary obligations with the more eccentric goals of art, all the while standing outside that airless room politely called the "art world," notwithstanding the resemblance of Atget's archive to nineteenth century photographers such as Charles Marville or to his contemporaries producing topographical, documentary and architectural photography (eg., Karl Abt and Henry Dixon).

In Szarkowski's hands Atget is the forebear to the generation of documentary art photographers the curator spent his influential career promoting--photographers like Robert Adams, Diane Arbus, William Eggleston, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand (not to mention Abbott's contemporary, Walker Evans, who first translated Atget for American audiences).