Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève

From the Cleveland Museum of Art record

This narrow street, the site of the founding of the University of Paris in 1112, ends in a church built in the 1600s. Atget sold his photographs not as art but as “documents for artists,” similar in purpose to the nude studies other photographers made for use by painters. That may be why he photographed early in the morning, when a normally bustling street like this one was empty. Eugène Atget's goal as a photographer was to document the old buildings and streets of Paris before they were demolished.