The Sunday Re-Post: Eugène Atget's Paris on SepiaTown

Eugène Atget, the great turn-of-the-century chronicler of Paris, is considered by many to be the first true modern photographer.

In 1898, at the advanced age of 41 (and with no former experience in the visual arts) he took up photography as a way to eke out a living by creating and selling straightforward  depictions of city scenes and architecture for artists to use for reference.   By the time he died in 1927, Atget had created  over 10,000 images of the city and its inhabitants. 

Atget's work was discovered  and heralded by later generations of artists, who recognized that his  photographs were much more than simple “documents for artists” (which is  how Atget regarded and described them throughout his  life). 

We've uploaded to SepiaTown a small  handful of Atget's photographs that the George Eastman house was good  enough to share with the public via Flickr Commons. There's much more material  where these came from, and we hope that many more of Atget's  poetic images of old Paris will be brought to life in a new way as they are uploaded to  SepiaTown.

Here's a sampling of Eugène Atget images on SepiaTown...

(click on any image to see it mapped on SepiaTown)

We're really excited about this then/now view because it is the first evidence we've seen of the Google Street View Tricycles handiwork.  In the coming months and years these tricycles will provide Google Street Views for new kinds of locations and the then/now view on SepiaTown will get more and more ubiquitous as a result.