In a career that lasted more than three decades, Eugène Atget compiled an inventory of more than 8,000 images of the city of Paris. Shunning modern photographic equipment and printing processes, Atget used an 8 x 10 view camera and glass-plate negatives to chronicle the city's past and its transition from the nineteenth century to the twentieth. His work addressed a wide range of subjects, all closely tied to his ideas about French culture as embodied in the narrow streets, courtyards, and grand buildings of "old" Paris and its surroundings.