From a distance, Eugène Atget’s photograph Environs, Amiens (circa 1897) appears to be an abstraction. It resolves as you approach into something like a craggy mountain peak or a mound of snow-covered rocks, but you have to get up close before the spotted triangular form in an ivory expanse comes into focus as a flock of birds perched atop the shingled roof of what must be a dovecote. One pokes its head out of a hole in the little door beneath the eaves. The tightly cropped picture, shot from below at a neck-straining angle, frames the building in perhaps the least intuitive way imaginable.

Even Atget’s more familiar pictures of the deserted streets and shabby interiors of old Paris still breathe mystery a century after his death. They are blissfully unburdened by ideas or narratives or even a discernible style. Staircases snake off somewhere behind the cursive of wrought-iron banisters; crumbling statues and charismatic trees pass the time in parks; bouquets and wicker baskets sit frankly in storefronts and market stalls, there for the taking.

Many of the fifty-odd photographs in the exhibition “Eugène Atget: The Making of a Reputation,” at the International Center of Photography, have the uncanny charm of a vacant stage set or, as Walter Benjamin suggested in 1931, the pregnant emptiness of a crime scene. But Atget always included something more than his descriptive titles suggest—a clue or a witness. He didn’t shoo away the children standing in the bottom right of his shot of the Hôtel de Clermont-Tonnerre around 1903, though the elaborate ornamentation around the building’s first-floor windows was likely his focus. For his picture of the Hôtel du Tillet de la Bussière, he didn’t ask a porter to move the neat stack of wooden trunks, topped with a hamper, that stands as a shrine to transience in the courtyard.

Atget didn’t call himself a photographer, and during his lifetime he never showed in a gallery or museum. A former actor, he registered with the state as an artiste dramatique, primarily for tax purposes. (Later he went by auteur-éditeur,though he never published the book on old Paris that he had long envisioned.) The bureaucratic distinction was not without a difference. On the hand-painted shingle that pointed the way to his home studio off the boulevard Raspail in Montparnasse, he advertised his wares not as fine art but as mere “documents pour artistes.” And at least at the start of his career, he stamped his prints as “documents artistiques.”

Atget’s origins were as modest as his medium’s. Orphaned at an early age, he was raised by his grandparents in Bordeaux. He went to sea as a cabin boy, though it is not known where or for how long. In 1878, at age twenty-one, he moved to Paris, and despite his unorthodox preparation he eventually gained entry to the prestigious National Conservatory of Music and Drama, where he studied while completing his military service. He showed promise, but the army took up too much of his time, and he was asked to leave. Later he joined a traveling troupe in which he mostly played graybeards and villains, whose harangues he was known to rehearse at the dinner table long after he had retired from the stage. He tried his hand at painting, but his landscapes were graceless. Sometime before 1888, when he settled in the Somme with his partner and fellow actor Valentine Delafosse-Compagnon, he taught himself to take photographs with the heavy wooden camera and brass barrel lens that he used for the rest of his life. Around 1890 the couple moved to the fifth arrondissement, and as the century drew to a close Atget followed his provincial eye through the modernizing capital’s ancient—and increasingly endangered—rues,mansions, and monuments.

Atget sold his “documents” to artists and artisans, who collected them more for information than for appreciation. We now see austere beauty in a close-up of, say, ornamental lozenges carved in stone, but masons saw a marketable pattern, and historical painters and illustrators and set designers saw a revealing detail. In the years before World War I, libraries, municipal preservation commissions, and a few private connoisseurs of old Paris became Atget’s best clients; in an entrepreneurial spirit, he put together themed albums of carriages, urban fortifications, and other subjects of antiquarian or anthropological interest and sold them to the Bibliothèque Nationale. In accordance with an intricate filing system, each negative received a number, which he sometimes scratched onto the bottom right corner of the glass plate.

The Great War seemed to defeat Atget—and it took the life of Valentine’s son, whom he had adopted. But as his professional activity slowed, his reputation grew. In the Twenties the Surrealists discovered in Atget’s deserted streets and ghostly mannequins reflections of their own interest in “the object as a thing in itself, of the object as a new reality, of the object isolated from its function,” in the words of the contemporary critic Waldemar George. Man Ray, whose studio was a few doors down from Atget’s, purchased about fifty pictures from him and put one—a rare crowd scene from 1912 of Parisians gazing up at an eclipse—on the cover of La Révolution surréaliste in 1926. When Man Ray asked how to credit him, Atget told him to leave his name out. “These are simply documents I make,” he said.

The young Ohioan Berenice Abbott first saw Atget’s prints in Man Ray’s studio, where she worked as an assistant in the mid-Twenties. She soon set about making the only real portraits of Atget, an unlikely addition to an impressive series that already included Jean Cocteau and James Joyce. While Atget was focused on the first word in “documents artistiques,” Abbott, when she pressed the shutter, put her emphasis, and ours, squarely on the second.

Abbott had come to Paris in 1921 to make herself into an artist, but she ended up making two. When Atget died, seemingly of sheer exhaustion, in 1927, she became what David Campany, the curator of “The Making of a Reputation,” calls his “champion.” Valentine had died a year earlier, and Atget had no heirs, so Abbott moved quickly to buy from one of his friends some 1,415 glass negatives and eight thousand vintage prints. And though she wasn’t alone—her friend and assistant Julia Reiner loaned her 10,000 francs for the purchase, and in 1930 Abbott sold half her share in the archive to the art dealer Julien Levy—she became Atget’s promoter and protector until the Museum of Modern Art finally bought the archive in 1968. John Szarkowski, MoMA’s curator of photography, then helped to secure Atget’s place at the center of the history of photography.

Abbott expended so much effort staging Atget exhibitions, selling his prints and rights, and building his reputation that she sometimes neglected her own. With great critical flair, she presented him to photography’s growing public in a series of magazine essays, some gathered at the ICP, and then in her definitive book The World of Atget (1964). Thereshe described her discovery of Atget—through his 1910 picture of a men’s clothing store, unfortunately not in the show—in near-religious terms: “There was a sudden flash of recognition—the shock of realism unadorned.”

Atget was venerated by Abbott and canonized by Szarkowski not as a Surrealist, as the early French critics might have liked, but as the patron saint of documentary photography. As she wrote in 1940, Abbott found in Atget “a new photography, poem of visual images, direct lyric of the photographer.” Walker Evans had written much the same thing in a review of Atget: Photographe de Paris,the 1930 book that brought him to broader attention, praising his “lyrical understanding of the street,” suffused by “a poetry which is not ‘the poetry of the street’ or ‘the poetry of Paris,’ but the projection of Atget’s person.”

Ever since, poetry has been, faute de mieux, one of the metaphors most frequently used for Atget’s bittersweet gaze. Like Evans, he had a taste for the lettering on storefronts, posters, and newspapers. And there’s something Dickinsonian about his empty spaces, his often quite literal slant; not a single photograph in the ICP exhibition is symmetrical, and he clearly loved the organic play of leaves or branches or reflections against rat-a-tat grids of bricks or bars. But poetry, I think, isn’t quite the right word for work that lives so fully on the surface. Atget’s depths—like the darkness visible through the open door of the church in Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève (1898)—always lie beyond reach.