2004-339: Porte de Montreuil, Zoniers

In just over three decades, the French photographer Eugène Atget made ten thousand photographic negatives that documented the cultural legacy of France and its rapidly changing capital, Paris. Atget considered himself a documentary photographer and marketed his services to artists, architects, libraries, and museums. His diverse portfolio included images of ragpickers’ shacks in an area just outside the nineteenth-century walls of Paris, known as the “zone.”