Revisiting Atget
Eugène Atget is known as the "father of modern photography." Over the course of three decades, between the end of the 19th century and his death in 1927, Atget made thousands of photographs of Paris. In doing so, he captured an indexical survey of a city in transformation from one century to another, and the transition from "Le Vieux Paris" to the modern city. In the late 1990's, a century after the beginning of Atget's photography career, artist Christopher Rauschenberg created a rephotographic survey of many of Atget's most iconic streetscape and park images of Paris, published in his book Paris Changing: Revisiting Eugène Atget's Paris. Twenty years after Rauschenberg's project, Washington and Lee photography and history students have retraced Atget's steps yet again in an effort to evaluate what has changed and what has stayed the same in the city.