Rue de l'Hôtel-de-Ville (84.XM.1034.7)

From the Getty Museum record

> On the left of Eugène Atget's view, a pepper-pot turret of the fifteenth-century Hôtel de Sens bellies out over a turn in the rue de l'Hôtel-de-Ville, which was first laid out in the thirteenth century roughly parallel to the River Seine on the Right Bank. A more orthodox photographer might have moved on around the bend to capture the principal facades of the mansion, the oldest nonreligious structure in Paris, but Atget was clearly interested in recording the narrow and crooked lineaments of the ancient street. Its appearance had last significantly changed when its old paving blocks were replaced with a smoother surface sometime after 1860. The pipe-smoking uniformed man who gazes toward the camera from the doorway of a hotel on the right (zoom in on image above) perhaps understood Atget's purpose or obeyed his specific request and moved into the recess in order that the foreground be unobstructed. As is consistently the case with Atget's street photographs, the view is one that a pedestrian moving into and through the space would see. > > Atget's instinct that this street was a part of Paris that would change was correct. The exterior of the Hôtel de Sens is now much restored; it now houses the Forney art library. The wall that leads to it in this [image](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:P1030887_Paris_IV_h%C3%B4tel_de_Sens_rwk.JPG) has been taken down, revealing a garden and partially liberating the building from the urban matrix that held it. The long exposure required to obtain detail in the deeply shadowed street has caused overexposure in the upper, more brightly lit stories of the various structures, creating an hourglass of light elbowed by triangles of darkness completely obliterating the conical roof of the turret. See another image of the Hôtel de Sens by Atget ([90.XM.64.167](https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/63601/eugene-atget-l'hotel-de-sens-actuellement-bibliotheque-forneyrue-du-riguier-4th-arrondissement-french-1898/)). > > Adapted from *Eugène Atget*, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum by Gordon Baldwin (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2000), 64. ©2000, J. Paul Getty Trust.