The invention of photography in the early 19th century profoundly transformed the history of painting. Since it was now possible to record realistic scenes using a camera obscura, what place was left for painters in their mimetic relationship with nature? Rather than compete with this new technique, the most daring painters sought to differentiate themselves from the fixed, “objective” image of photography, by venturing into new, more expressive and impressionistic terrain. In return, photography never ceased to emancipate itself from technique, until it became an artistic practice in its own right. While photographers fought against the camera's “kinetic blur”, painters tried to transcribe it into their paintings, arguing that even a fixed model is always moving as long as it's alive. It is in this ambivalence that the work of Atget and Carrière is situated, both of whom posterity will recognize as precursors.

Atget and Carrière probably never met, even though they were contemporaries and both lived in the same neighborhoods. While Atget paced the streets of Paris, documenting the smallest shopfronts, the carriage doors that reveal the courtyards of buildings or the streets of a Paris on the verge of transformation, Carrière preferred the solitude of his Parisian apartment, where the bustle of daily life and the familiarity of his recurring models were sources of inspiration. Although Carrière never took photographs, his monochrome paintings are reminiscent of Atget's albumen prints. Yet each proceeded with the same systematic approach, repeating the same subjects over and over again. For Atget, it's streets, architectural details, flowers, rarely people. The framing of these photographs becomes more and more precise, more and more constructed, despite the modest ambition to produce “documents for artists” that he displayed on his studio sign. For Carrière, it was his wife and children, his loved ones caught up in their daily activities, who were his favorite, repeating the same portraits of women, often his own, maternities and landscapes. Atget, like Carrière, sought out the infra-thinness of a new detail, the endless desire to begin again.