Eugène Atget lived from 1857 to 1927 and made it his mission to document Paris in photographs. He saw the city as a huge cabinet of curiosities, one that was slowly disappearing with the coming of the modern age. Shop fronts, alleyways, architectural details, not to mention trees and parks—these subjects add up to a soul, which he captured straight-on in stillness or reflected in windows or appearing ghostly in mist. Having built a collection of superb Atgets over the last 25 years, Mary and Dan Solomon recently offered the 209 photographs to the Getty, a portion of them donated, which makes the Getty’s collection of Atgets the finest in the country. This exhibition draws from those photographs. “With Atget as our guide,” says Jim Ganz, the Getty Museum’s senior curator of photographs, “the sprawling cacophony of visual noise and activity that characterized the French capital is organized into a series of silent still images.” —Laura Jacobs