Art Institute of Chicago

Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève near the Intersection of Rue LaPlace (Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève prés de carrefour de la rue LaPlace)

Charles Marville

Date

1865/69

Medium

Albumen print

Culture

France

Department

Photography and Media

Institution

Art Institute of Chicago

Beginning in 1862, Charles Marville served as the official photographer of the city of Paris, documenting the radical reconstruction of the city under Napoleon III's Prefect of the Seine, Georges-Eugène Haussmann. In a process that became known as Haussmannization, many of Paris's narrow medieval streets were demolished in order to make room for the wide boulevards and public parks for which it is now known. The city commissioned Marville to photograph the areas slated for destruction as well as the modern amenities, such as gas lighting and commercial kiosks, that would become fixtures of the new urban landscape. With a corpus of more than 400 photographs, Marville produced a remarkable document of Paris in a time of epochal transition.

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