Eugène Atget was a french photographer who became most well known for his photographs of Paris. Starting in his 40s, Atget roamed the streets of Paris, taking pictures of landscapes, animals, flowers, monuments, and most notably, architecture among various other things. The influence of his work is interesting because he was not progressive or very self expressive. Instead he focused on developing his technique to produce original photographs. To this day he remains the benchmark for most sophisticated contemporary photographers.
Atget’s career started in the 1890s as a reference library of photographs for other artists. Despite technological advancements in photography where cameras were able to shift the development of photographs into the darkroom at a later time, he opted to use a large view camera. This large view camera would produce larger pictures and therefore pictures of better quality. To maximize the sense of space and ambiance captured by his camera, he would often shoot his pictures using diffuse lighting at dawn. Through the rest of his life as a photographer, the modernization of Paris would coincide. Because of this, his photography also served as documentation of how the city changed through the years. Artists that had acknowledged his work and used them include Man Ray, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso.
Sources
https://www.moma.org/artists/229
https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/constituents/eug%C3%A8ne-atget?all/all/all/all/0
http://www.atgetphotography.com/The-Photographers/Eugene-Atget.html