Eugène Atget: The Making of a Reputation

At the International Center of Photography, “Eugène Atget: The Making of a Reputation” looks past the familiar Paris street scenes to examine how Atget’s photographs became a modern touchstone. The exhibition traces the networks of editors, collectors, and institutions that shaped his posthumous standing, and how his images moved from working documents into the art canon. In New York, where museums and publishers helped define 20th-century photographic taste, the show reads as a local chapter in that history. Its critical edge is methodological: reputation is treated as a constructed object, not a natural outcome.