Organ Grinder (Joueur d'Orgue)

This is the most exuberant of the images in Atget's series of the street trades of Paris made at the end of the nineteenth century. At his death Atget left behind thousands of prints and negatives that were meticulous records of Paris, its streets, shops, domestic interiors, and environs, at the beginning of the twentieth century. Late in life, the then-obscure photographer was embraced by a younger generation of artists, especially the Surrealists, but Atget himself always maintained that he simply made documents, not works of art. Berenice Abbott, working as a portrait photographer in Paris in the 1920s, had befriended Atget and, after his death, purchased around 1400 negatives and 8000 prints from his estate. She took these back to New York in 1929 and for the next forty years never ceased to promote Atget's work in books, exhibitions, and portfolios printed from his negatives. Her own series of photographs of a changing New York City in the 1930s reflects Atget's documentary approach in both its subjects and compositions.