Some exhibitions confirm your view of an artist. Others enlarge or alter what you thought you knew. And still others make you question what once seemed to be perfectly sound opinions. “Looking at Atget,” the modest but notably thoughtful photography exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art until November 27, does all of these.[1] To begin with, the show is not simply another overview of Eugène Atget’s images, pleasurable as that might be, but rather an inquiry into how this mysterious artist’s work has been perceived, during his lifetime and after. The “looking” of the title refers particularly to the viewpoint of the two Americans most responsible for establishing Atget’s international reputation, the photographer Berenice Abbott and the collector-dealer-champion of Surrealism Julian Levy. Through an engaging mix of Atget’s signature images and less familiar ones, the exhibition provokes interesting questions about how Atget thought of his own work, how he wanted it to be seen, and where he fits into conceptions of modernism. “Looking at Atget” even flirts with larger notions of how reputations are formed and how photographs themselves are regarded as fact or fiction. If this sounds like the outline of a College Art Association session titled something like “The Self, the Other, and History: Perceptions of Eugène Atget,” think again. “Looking at Atget” is fresh and refreshing, not only because Atget’s photographs are so visually and emotionally compelling, but also because the questions the exhibition considers really do enhance your experience of his work.