Book excerpt: Between 1909 and 1915 Eugène Atget produced seven albums filled with photographs of Paris at the height of its belle époque. This book presents Atget's albums in full for the first time, edited with the sequencing and repetition that the great photographer intended. In addition, Atget's pictures are analyzed in an altogether new way; as commercial picture documents produced by a photographer for the artists, archivists, antiquarians, designers, and builders who were his clients. Atget's Seven Albums is thus many books-a critical edition, a fresh view of Atget's work, a new kind of history of photography, and a social history of art and of Paris in the early twentieth century.