For a photographer so ubiquitous as Eugène Atget, it can be surprising how little intervention some of his works seem to have required on the part of the author. The objects in his photographs, found in and around the streets of Paris at the beginning of the last century, can appear to have been captured indiscriminately and without much apparent care or fuss. His way of photographing the world was as though it was made up of things, each in turn ready to be isolated and documented.

La Voiture à Paris, the title of a 1910 album produced for the Bibliothèque historique (the series contains pictures of 48 wheeled vehicles) sounds like uninspiring subject matter, but with it Atget produces a bitter account of urban life, laden with all the contradictions and backwardness present in his newly-industrialised metropolis; a city run on out-of-date technology by a well-coded, but equally decrepit social strata. It would be easy to fall into the trap that Atget just tells it like it is, but by assuming the model of the photographer as collector, he managed to transform the dumb logic of bureaucracy – with its endless inventories and categorisations – into a form of personal expression that was far from silent.

In one picture a wagon used to transport drink from a local distillery stops centre frame. It is seen slightly at an angle and marked out in front of a blank wall. All the little details of the carriage, from the logo painted on the side, to the backside of a horse showing how it is pulled along, seem relevant by virtue of the fact that there is no real subject to the photograph other than the thing itself. It is pure document, like a straight photocopy from original to reproduction. The vehicle, as with many other objects that found themselves sitting before Atget’s lens, simply offers itself up and declares its own bawdy material presence. La Voiture seems to follow the mantra which would be later followed by the Minimalists of “one after the other”, as if Atget was going about the streets, setting up his tripod and view camera, taking the shot and simply moving along to the next thing.

With Atget, we are introduced to the concept of a practitioner who was not only a photographer, but a collector actually using photographs to construct some sort of logic out of the resulting finds. A century on, the methods of near-unauthored collecting developed by Atget are still very much in use. Indeed, more commonly so than ever before. The vast majority of photographs encountered in today’s visual climate – within the pages of shopping manuals, the endless shifting archives on the Internet, and the day-in-day-out stock used by the mass-media – are likewise, not embellished formal statements, but, rather, anonymous pictures describing the appearance of simple objects.

Photography has certainly flourished with the development of truly throwaway saturated colour printing methods. Bookshops have seen an explosion in inexpensive volumes packed with hundreds of images documenting every minutia of object and commodity available. From books documenting signs for lost animals, to pages and pages of exotic film posters, to libraries of boring postcards, to albums filled with all manner of products and packaging. Wherever someone might happen to point a lens, a new category is revealed. Digital databases of photographs proliferate throughout every form of online culture as well, helping to list the inventories of each museum, interest group or virtual store, for instance, or fuelling the sales of second-hand commodities on eBay. After Atget, this is where photography exists in its primary and purest form to date.

When writer Lev Manovich argues that “the world appears to us as an endless and unstructured collection of images, texts, and other data records” it is not difficult to see what he means. For him, the key form of cultural expression of the modern age is the database, which stands in opposition to narrative; each document sharing the same status as any other, ready to be shuffled, sorted and recalled at the touch of a button. Whilst photography has at some points throughout its history favoured the narrative – as for example in 1940s colour magazines such as Life and Picture Post – this role has largely been usurped by film. The narrative form of choice, film has taken over many of the areas to which the still medium previously laid claim. Ever since, photography has tended towards doing what it does best: converting each part of the visible world into a fixed, unchanging document.

Artists using cameras to collect categories of things turn up all over the history of photography too, from Ed Ruscha’s Twentysix Gasoline Stations of 1963, to Candida Höfer’s series of zoo animals produced throughout the 1990s. More recently, the work of The Atlas Group still places photography firmly within the archival mould. Each page of Notebook Volume 38. Already Been in a Lake of Fire describes the make, model and colour of a vehicle used as a car-bomb during the Lebanese civil wars, from 1975 to 1991. Shown alongside detailed notes recounting when and where that particular model was deployed is a cut and pasted photograph. In the hands of the artist, this series becomes an obsessive guide to what once might have been an unconscious game played out in the minds of a civilian; one of identifying and avoiding suspect vehicles on the street.

For The Atlas Group though, the database or archive is something which can now be assembled even without picking up a camera. The images of the cars can be gleaned from other sources; what becomes important is the way that the photographs are used or gathered together, and the message that these bundles of logic purport to relay. Increasingly, artists are realising that there are few images which do not already exist, or are not already being taken by someone else keen to collect that part of the world most interesting to them. Whilst traditionally, it has been the preserve of photographers to venture into, and make visible, situations which would otherwise go unseen (as was the case with Atget); quite simply, that can no longer be considered necessary. In a world that produces billions of pictures each year, new photographs have reached saturation point. There are just too many of them. The conscientious photographer of today will have to ask him or herself a difficult question: why make yet another image?