Atget was seventy when he died, still a photographer. Did he too believe, as he made his solitary way through the streets of pre-industrial Paris, that "everything had changed"? Atget's early twentieth-century Paris was still a city full of dusty light and robust trees and little gardens and cobblestone courtyards and medieval ornamentation. And yet, looking at Atget’s photographs, it seems clear to me that Atget must have known that something was coming; and he must have known - he, who fell in love with the tender, specific beauties of an ancient city - that this something would change everything.