Rue Saint-Martin, Paris

Haunting this scene are the ghostly traces of figures who moved during exposure. Though Eugène Atget often worked at dawn to avoid photographing people, he could not, in this instance, avoid recording them completely. Their hazy forms heighten the sense that we are looking at pictures of a vanishing world.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Atget made thousands of views of old Paris, before large scale demolition projects made room for modern boulevards. He obsessively documented its historic architecture, store fronts, and gardens with an antiquated, large-format camera.