To the extent that oncoming traffic, reconfigured streets, ongoing construction and innumerable other challenges permitted, I took my photographs from the exact location and with the same perspective as those selected by Atget. My photographs were then enlarged to the same size as the glass plates he used, 18 x 24 centimeters.  Placed together in a two-window mat, the resulting diptychs, which now number over 250, reveal the Paris of Atget, then and now.

Much of the Paris which Atget photographed still remains, generating a nostalgia for what has passed, as well as a celebration of the Paris that continues to resist the ravages of time.

My exhaustive study of Atget and his methodology has brought me the honor of having been invited to lecture at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Museum of the City of New York in connection with their exhibitions of his work.  But following in his footsteps -- down those narrow, winding streets, many still retaining their cobblestone pavements -- has been considerably more than a mere academic experience. There is, for me, an emotional response which never fails to be elicited when, turning the corner of some lesser-known little street in the 5th, I discover the very sight which caused Atget to pause, unburden himself of his cumbersome heavy wooden tripod, meticulously position his unwieldy view camera and preserve a delightful piece of Paris for generations to come.

"A glory of which I could not speak filled me then like a shimmering of sunlight. It was the ten thousand famous photographs Atget had made of a Paris now gone, those great, voiceless images bathed in the brown of gold chloride – I was thinking of them and of their author, out before dawn every morning, slowly stealing a city from those who inhabited it, a tree here, a store front, an immortal fountain." 

(Salter, James. A Sport and A Pastime, New York: Modern Library, 1995, pp. 12-13.)