Atget settled in Paris in the 1890s. Despite his limited background in the visual arts, he saw photography as a source of income, selling his photographs to artists in the nearby town of Montparnasse. He advertised his photographs as "documents for artists." It was common practice at the time for painters to paint scenes and nudes from photographs. By the mid-1890s, Atget bought his first camera and began to photograph more than 10,000 images of the people and sights of the French capital. By 1899, he had moved to Montparnasse, where he lived and earned a modest income until his death in 1927.

Atget photographed Paris with a large-format wooden bellows camera with a rapid rectilinear lens. The images were exposed and developed as 18x24cm glass dry plates. Besides supplying fellow artists, architects, publishers and interior decorators with his photographs of a dream-like Paris, he was also commissioned by city Bureaus and the Carnavalet Museum to preserve and record landmarks in France's capital city.

Atget's photographs attracted the attention of well-known painters such as Man Ray, Andre Derain, Henri Matisse and Picasso in the 1920s. Berenice Abbott was the key that unlocked Atget's Paris for the rest of the world. She got to know him in the 1920s, when she was an assistant to Atget's Montparnasse neighbor Man Ray. She attempted to help Atget achieve greater recognition during his lifetime by sending friends to purchase his work and by making a celebrity-style photographic portrait of him.

French artist, Louis Daguerre, born near Paris in 1787 used the camera obscura which led him to experiemnt with 3D representations of what he saw. He became aware of developments by Joseph-Nicephore Nieepce. Niepce's aim was to use light to create plates that could be inked and printed to produce accurate reproductions of original works or scenes. One of Niepce's experiments, made in 1826, is a view from his studio window that took eight hours to expose. It is recognized as the world's earliest photograph and is preserved in the Gernsheim Collection. The two men formed a partnership to develop and commercialize their shared dream.The Daguerreotype was the first successful photographic process created in 1839. Many of the daguerreotypes that remain are noticeable for their detail, and this caused quite a sensation at the time.