Ouch!

The "geniuses" of Steiglitz and Steichen are nothing more than a New York publicity trick in an era that worshipped at the altar of mass-market reputations. They were artists who lived in rooms decorated with soft gray velvet walls. The walls showed off their pretty pictures, and in the end they will be forgotten like the quaint haberdashery of another period.

—from the foreword to Berenice Abbott & Eugène Atget (Arena Editions, 2002), by Clark Worswick