The photographs, in all their complications, should be allowed to speak for themselves, and I think that David Campany, the curator of “Eugène Atget: The Making of a Reputation” (at the International Center of Photography, through May 4th), has every intention of letting them do just that, but even he can’t help sometimes trying too hard to get us to cozy up to Atget. For one thing, he has painted the exhibition walls a burgundy color, which is perhaps meant to evoke a dark, lush Belle Époque feeling. In Campany’s defense, I wonder how far those who love Atget’s work can get from the desire to soften it for others. Despite photography’s many advances since Atget’s time, it is still a slippery medium, hard to define. Part of Atget’s greatness was the way he made room for boredom and the unremarkable. This is, in a sense, what makes modern art modern: you flatten out the high and the low by treating them the same way. And Atget was a man who didn’t believe in hierarchies of visual experience, who stood for a long time in front of what others might call nothing, seeing everything.