It is interesting to note that John Szarkowski chose this image to represent the Museum of Modern Art's substantial holding of Atget's photographs from the Abbott-Levy Collection in his seminal book of descriptive essays, Looking at Photographs. Published eight years prior to the first volume of The Work of Atget, the commitment to Atget's work on a whole is evident and prefigures much of the intention behind the four exhibitions and accompaning catalogues of Maria Morris Hambourg's writings on the photographer. Szarkowski wrote on Atget: Until his death thirty years later he worked quietly at his calling. To a casual observer he might have seemed a typical commercial photographer of the day. He was not progressive, but worked patiently with techniques that were obsolescent when he adopted them, and very nearly anachronistic by the time of his death. He was little given to experiment in the conventional sense, and less to theorizing. He founded no movement and attracted no circle. He did however make photographs which for purity and intensity of vision have not been bettered. ...The pictures that he made in the service of this concept are seductively and deceptively simple, wholly poised, reticent, dense with experience, mysterious and true. (cf., p. 64)