Eugène Atget, February 12, 1857–August 4, 1927, was a French photographer born in Libourne. He studied drama at the Paris Conservatory and worked as an actor before taking up commercial photography in the late 1880s. He subsequently worked in Paris and its surrounding districts.

Atget photographed streets, buildings, shopwindows, gardens, and street trades, supplying documentary images to artists and public institutions. In Paris he became acquainted with Man Ray and Berenice Abbott. After his death, Abbott acquired and promoted a substantial archive of his photographs and negatives; the Museum of Modern Art acquired that collection in 1968.

His photographs are held by the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Carnavalet Museum – History of Paris, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven.

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