Atget's populism

Abstract

During the years 1898 and 1899, Eugène Atget produced a series of photographs depicting Parisian street pedlars. These photographs, known as his petits métiers series, portray men and women who were associated with long-standing occupations of the lower classes in France. Examples of his work include the lampshade pedlar (figure 1), the seller of wire baskets (figure 2), the knife grinder, and bread seller. Rather than representing the generic poor, Atget chose well-known subjects: for centuries in Paris, men and women of the petits metiers were romanticized by virtue of their unchanging distinctive calls, costumes, and traditions. These photographs are unique in Atget's early work. They depart from his architectural views and scenes of empty city streets, for which he was best known, and concentrate instead on a borrowed visual tradition: the iconography of the petit metier.