Between 1909 and 1915, Eugène Atget (1857–1927) produced seven albums filled with photographs of Paris at the height of its belle époque. The albums were prototypes for books that were never published. Now for the first time Atget's albums are presented in full, edited with the sequencing and repetition that the great photographer intended. In addition, Atget's pictures are analyzed in an altogether new way: as commercial picture documents produced by a photographer for the artists, archivists, antiquarians, designers, and builders who were his clients.

Molly Nesbit defines and explores the nature of Atget's pictures in terms of their form, practical vision, and relation to knowledge, providing the first discussion of the commercial picture document. She also offers a glimpse into the politics of Atget's ways of seeing: how he identified with the far left; how his sense of modern life and the variety in popular culture was exhibited through the artisans, cabarets, ragpicker carts, and marketplaces he photographed; how his albums opened up a space without bourgeois order, an elliptical, often beautiful image of mass culture.

Atget's Seven Albums is thus many books—a critical edition, a fresh view of Atget's work, a new kind of history of photography, and a social history of art and Paris in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

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