Metalworker's Shop, passage de la Réunion

In the courtyard of his shop, a metalworker stands with one hand on his hip; a stiffly posed woman, presumably his wife, appears in a window above him; and a man stands in the distance at the end of the alley. The locations of these three people, all of whom direct their attention at the photographer, form a dynamic triangle. The passage de la Réunion provided a spatially exciting subject for Eugène Atget, who would have observed the alley's various planes, created by straight and curving walls and their relationship to the patterned road. For this photographer concerned with places and aspects of Parisian life that were disappearing, this alley, essentially unaltered from a much earlier period, was an ideal subject for his photographic collection. Atget sold images such as this one to artists who then used the photographic documents as source material for their own work.