Curatorial description (18 December 2015)
During the last five years of Atget's life, he photographed the cathedral of Notre-Dame regularly, but always in his own eccentric way -- either from a distance, as we see here, or in microscopic detail. His favourite view was from the Quai de Montebello where, as one author has suggested, he could make a pictorial link between the branches of the trees and the gothic tracery of the cathedral. The cathedral of Notre-Dame is the most obvious of the historic monuments of Paris, and for this reason Atget never included it in his early work. Too many photographers had already supplied in abundance the kind of documentation of Notre-Dame required by the collectors of Old Paris. But in his old age, he could afford to please himself.
