Untitled (Milliner's Shop)

Eugène Atget began taking photographs with a tripod-mounted box camera in the late 1880s, eventually producing about ten thousand photographs of Paris and its environs. His images-still and silent scenes, usually devoid of people- document the ordinary and extraordinary sights that captivated him: landscapes, architecture, and design. This milliner's shop displays hats that seem to take on a life of their own through their reflection in the mirror. Behind the hat stand, a chair implies the presence of a person, but no one is there.

Although Atget never intended his photographs to be artistic commodities, the seemingly accidental effects and spatial dislocations between objects and their reflections that he produced attracted the notice of other artists, particularly that of American photographer Berenice Abbott, who met Atget in 1925. At his death two years later, Abbott obtained most of his estate, including glass negatives (some of which she later reprinted); the Museum of Modern Art later acquired much of this material.

Atget's Milliner's Shop-along with works by Franz Roh, Maurice Tabard, Lotte Jacobi, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Albert Renger-Patzsch-were presented to the AMAM in 2005 by Peter Frumkin (OC 1984) in memory of his father, Allan. Many of these photographers were not previously represented in the collection. Ten additional albumen prints by Atget were part of an important 2009 gift by Paul Walter (OC 1957), which also included two hundred photographs by Richard Avedon, Frederick Evans, Baron Adolph de Meyer, Nadar, and Carl Van Vechten, among many others. These gifts allow the museum's photography collection to support a broad range of innovative classes in many departments, including the Cinema Studies Program.