2004-342: Fête du Trône – Le Géant

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. The often-surreal nature of his images, such as this the carnival display of chairs and shoes belonging to a dwarf and a giant, appealed to the Surrealists, who saw in his photographs an urban iconography of a haunted modernity. He did not receive widespread recognition until the 1920s, when the American photographer Berenice Abbott published many of his images and championed his work.