[3][4] In 1890, Atget moved back to Paris[6] and became a professional photographer, supplying documents for artists:[7] studies for painters, architects, and stage designers.

[3] During World War I Atget temporarily stored his archives in his basement for safekeeping and almost completely gave up photography.

It is believed that Atget was poor, while at the same time, there is an assumption that the photographer’s cramped financial circumstances are a myth established by later researchers in attempts to create the image of a romantic artist.

The negatives show four small clear rebates (printing black) where clips held the glass in the plate-holder during exposure.

The glass plates were 180×240mm Bande Bleue (Blue Ribbon) brand with a general purpose gelatin-silver emulsion,[14] fairly slow, that necessitated quite long exposures, resulting in the blurring of moving subjects seen in some of his pictures.

Prints would be numbered and labelled on their backs in pencil then inserted by the corners into four slits cut in each page of albums.

[20][11] By 1891 Atget advertised his business with a shingle at his door, remarked later by Berenice Abbott,[10] that announced “Documents pour Artistes”.

Initially his subjects were flowers, animals, landscapes, and monuments; sharp and meticulous studies centred simply in the frame and intended for artists' use.

[26] He framed the winding streets to show the historic buildings in context, rather than making frontal architectural elevations.

Amongst his scant surviving documents was his notebook, known by the word Repertoire on its cover (the French repertoire meaning a thumb-indexed address book or directory, but also defined, aptly in actor Atget's case, as 'a stock of plays, dances, or items that a company or a performer knows or is prepared to perform').

The book is now in the MoMA collection, and in it he recorded the names and addresses of 460 clients;[28] architects, interior decorators, builders and their artisans skilled in ironwork, wood panelling, door knockers, also painters, engravers, illustrators, and set designers, jewellers René Lalique and Weller, antiquarians and historians, artists including Tsuguharu Foujita, Maurice de Vlaminck and Georges Braque, well-known authors, editors, publishers Armand Colin and Hachette, and professors, including the many who donated their own collections of his photographs to institutions.

The address book lists also contacts at publications, such as L’Illustration, Revue Hebdomadaire, Les Annales politiques et litteraires, and l’Art et des artistes.

[21][20][11] This circumstance allows us to perceive Atget’s works as an example of a specific artistic program and consider them as an example of non-logical forms in photography.

[20] It is not entirely clear what should be considered a master’s work—a single selected frame or a complete corpus of several thousand images.

Atget's photographs highlighted the problem of the singularity of the work and questioned the possibility of its integrity and semantic completeness.

[35] He published several of Atget's photographs in his La Révolution surréaliste;[3][4] most famously in issue number 7, of 15 June 1926, his Pendant l’éclipse made fourteen years earlier and showing a crowd gathered at the Colonne de Juillet to peer through various devices, or through their bare fingers, at the Solar eclipse of 17 April 1912.

"[38] Man Ray proposed that Atget's pictures of staircases, doorways, ragpickers, and especially those with window reflections (when foreground and background mix and mannequins looks like ready to step out[39]), had a Dada or Surrealist quality about them.

[41] Benjamin views Atget as a forerunner of surrealist photography, effectively making him a member of the European avant-garde.

[42] He will be remembered as an urbanist historian, a genuine romanticist, a lover of Paris, a Balzac of the camera, from whose work we can weave a large tapestry of French civilization.After Atget's death his friend, the actor André Calmettes, sorted his work into two categories; 2,000 records of historic Paris, and photographs of all other subjects.

[46] When Berenice Abbott reportedly asked him if the French appreciated his art, he responded ironically, "No, only young foreigners.

[3][4] MoMA published a four-volume series of books based on its four successive exhibitions of Atget's life and work, between 1981 and 1985.

[54] The most complete is an album of domestic interiors titled Intérieurs Parisiens Début du XXe Siècle, Artistiques, Pittoresques & Bourgeois.

1, Jardin des Tuileries has only four pages still intact, and the other lacks a cover and title but contains photographs from numerous Parisian parks.

Although no statement by Atget about his technique or aesthetic approach survives,[40] he did sum up his life's work in a letter to the Minister of Fine Arts; For more than 20 years I have been working alone and of my own initiative in all the old streets of Old Paris to make a collection of 18 × 24cm photographic negatives: artistic documents of beautiful urban architecture from the 16th to the 19th centuries…today this enormous artistic and documentary collection is finished; I can say that I possess all of Old ParisThe U.S. Library of Congress was unable to determine the ownership of the twenty Atget photographs in its collection,[51] thus suggesting that they are technically orphan works.