Met Museum: Charles Marville: Photographer of Paris

The current exhibit at the Met Museum, Charles Marville: Photographer of Paris, is of interest to anyone who has ever visited that city and has been enthralled by its beauty as much as I have over the years.  But this is not a picturesque overview of the gentrified metropolis as it exists today but rather a journey back in time to the days of La Vie en Bohème when Paris was on the verge of the vast modernization that would destroy not only architectural masterpieces that had existed since the Middle Ages but would also alter much of the city's character in the process.

Marville was actually the official photographer commissioned by state authorities to produce a record of the city as it was transformed by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann under the auspices of Emperor Napoleon III.  Marville had previously documented the renovation of the Bois du Boulogne and was in a unique position to bring his experience from that project as well as his extensive knowledge of his native city to bear in creating this new work.  The resulting overview consists of scores of photographs that show the construction of the new wide boulevards and such landmarks as the Paris Opéra as well as the installation of public amenities that ranged from lampposts to urinals.  More importantly, Marville also recorded the old narrow winding streets and businesses located on them before they were demolished and lost forever.  Most fascinating are his photos of the outlying arrondissements that had only recently been incorporated into the city limits.  These neighborhoods still retained the feel of small villages in the countryside at the time Marville photographed them.

There are distinct differences between Marville's oeuvre and that of the later work done by Eugene Atget.  Although the latter also documented the streets of Paris, he did so on a private basis.  His work is therefore more idiosyncratic than Marville's.  Atget's work was in fact highly regarded by the Surrealists for its unusual point of view.  Morevover, by the time Atget commenced his work, the rebuilding of Paris had already been completed.  Marville, on the other hand, was engaged in a municipal project on an official basis and so was more limited in expressing his own point of view.  Nevertheless, Marville's aesthetic vision constantly projects itself on the dry historical record and raises his work to the level of art.

The photographer's earliest work was done using paper negatives and salt prints, that is, the original calotype process invented by Talbot.  Later technical advances enabled Marville to move on to albumen prints of images shot on glass negatives.  This resulted in much sharper and more detailed prints. Of particular interest to photographers are several prints in the exhibit entitled "Cloud Studies" or "Sky Studies."  At at time when the tonal range of available materials was so limited that it was almost impossible to show a landscape and cloudy sky in the same print, Marville got around the problem by photographing only the sky with a well known landmark discreetly silhouetted in the background.  These images prefigured Stieglitz's Equivalents by decades.  Though an eerie similarity exists between them, I'm not sure that Stieglitz was aware of Marville's photographs at the time he completed his own series.

There is also a small exhibit being shown in conjunction with the Marville entitled Paris as Muse: Photography, 1840s - 1930s.  This is a delightful small show of images of Paris taken by photographers who resided in the city at one time or another and were inspired by it.  Included are prints by Brassaï, Man Ray, Kertész and Atget.  These works complement the Marville images very well and are definitely worth seeing for their own sake.

Both exhibits continue through May 4, 2014.