Photographe de Paris was the first monograph on Atget, published simultaneously in American, French, and German editions on the occasion of one-man exhibition at the renowned Weyhe Gallery in New York. The novelist, poet, and essayist Pierre Mac Orlan, who penned some of the best and most provocative writing ever about photography, contributed an essay to the book. In it, he called Atget ‘ a man of the street, an artisan Poet of the crossroads of Paris’ but also ‘a cultivated man and thus perfectly informed about the resources of the tools and techniques he employed’. His essay concludes, ‘For many among us Atget’s Paris is now no more than a memory whose delicacy is already mysterious. It is worth all the books written on the subject, and without doubt will inspire others.’ Over time, Atget’s photographs have come to be seen by many as the beginning of modern photography. Abbott’s portrait of Atget, which appears as frontispiece to Atget - Photographe de Paris, pictures him in profile, sitting on a stool wearing a long dark coat, his hair mussed, gazing off into the far distance, as if into the future he helped create. “The book’s view of Atget, amplified over the years by Abbott in numerous exhibitions, in the French and German editions of this book, and in her later publication, The World of Atget, dominated for many years, but even as our knowledge and understanding of the photographer’s life and work grows, we still look to these pictures for the essence of Atget. Ultimately, however, his own aims and intentions remain as ineffable as ever. In a contemporary review of the book, the young Walker Evans expressed a clear idea of what Atget at least meant to photographers and documentary/modernist practice: ‘His general note is lyrical understanding of the street, trained observation of it, special feeling for patina, eye for revealing detail, over all of which is thrown a poetry of the street’ or ‘the poetry of Paris’ but the projection of Atget’s person