BRUNSWICK — An American photographer who studied with Ansel Adams and befriended Alfred Stieglitz in his final years, Todd Webb (1905–2000) spent the last decades of his life in Maine. This exhibition, however, considers the extraordinary imagery that Webb produced in New York and Paris between 1946 and 1952, just after he was discharged from the United States Navy.

To contextualize Webb’s work, the exhibition considers its relationship to that of Eugène Atget (1857–1927), the prolific chronicler of Old Paris who had produced photographic “documents” frequently purchased by painters, archivists, and libraries. Atget’s retrospective vision assumed added significance after World War II, and he became a touchstone for photographers and curators attempting to define a documentary mode. Although he borrowed certain compositional strategies from Atget, Webb seized on historically specific markers in his scenes of everyday life after the war: New York doorways festooned with “Welcome Home” banners, and a Parisian cobbler’s shop seeming to announce an end to the rationing of rubber and leather, for example.

Featuring more than 60  photographs on loan from the estate of Todd and Lucille Webb, and 10 Atget photographs from George Eastman House, “After Atget” offers new insight into Webb’s remarkably sensitive and graphically powerful body of work. The exhibition is accompanied by a 48-page catalogue with an introduction by Britt Salvesen, curator of the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and essay by Diana Tuite, curator of the exhibition at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art.