In 1862, Charles Marville became the official photographer of Paris, with a mission—not to celebrate the new, but to chronicle what was passing away. He had precious little time to lose. We’ll always have Paris, but not the way he found it.
The city had opened the first of its grand arteries, on the way to the most sweeping reinvention of a city since ancient Rome. Twenty thousand houses were destroyed, and construction of such landmarks as the Paris Opera, the Salon Carré of the Louvre, and a new museum of antiquities had begun. 
Marville had already documented the first of Baron Haussmann’s great reforms, the Bois de Boulogne, starting in 1858. Now, though, he was concerned not for the future, but for the vanishing present, and I have placed this with an earlier review of another photographer of that decade, Julia Margaret Cameron, as a longer review and my latest upload.
His task must sound strange to American ears, all the stranger in that the French government set several other photographers to the task as well. One may think of the city of lights as the old world’s unchanging perfection, or one may think of the future as reinventing itself every day. Not the French. As emperor, Louis Napoleon appointed Georges-Eugène Haussmann prefect of the Seine, with the aim of sweeping away the remnants of a medieval city, to make his reign a vanguard for Europe. Those new boulevards also served, literally, to move the troops. And yet that vision of a nation and its character also depended on deep roots in the past.
Besides, a scientific world-view and an empire alike required thorough documentation, and Marville seemed perfect for the task. He had shown his skill with cloud studies, at a time when photography struggled to deal with the evanescent and with the full range of frequencies of natural light. He also showed the requisite lack of imagination. He was nearing forty when he took up photography in the early 1850s, and he went straight for the beloved bridges across the Seine, columnar statues in their niches, and portraits of an assistant brooding Romantically for the occasion. Now he had special access to work in progress, as well as to the angels and gargoyles on the roof of Notre Dame. His most striking composition shows the cathedral spire in towering close-up, with an entire city in sunlight stretched out far below.
He went to construction sites, with rubble everywhere in evidence, and to shantytowns. He went to quarries with the stones to replace them, often in newly incorporated districts on the outskirts of the city. He went from curbstone to curbstone, for an emerging sidewalk infrastructure of street signs, lampposts, kiosks, and public urinals. Yet his favorite shot aims straight down a narrow street, with a burst of light at the end. Does that make its dark beauty all the more confining—and the rivulets of sewage water all the more glistening? All the better, for they were fated for destruction.
Great changes rarely come singly. In its artifice of a natural wonder, the Bois de Boulogne has a striking parallel in Central Park, another Romantic garden opened in 1857. Within Paris, the grand boulevards came about alongside the grands magasins, or department stores—and the Met made the case barely a year ago for the importance of both to art, with “Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity.” Now it exhibits Marville in context of forty additional photographs, both through May 4. “Paris as Muse” shows not just the architecture of a changing city, from 1834 to the 1920s, but also a changing politics, a changing medium, and a changing art. Marville had remade himself as well, discarding a birth name, Bossu, that means hunchback, but that was only the beginning.
The changing political landscape included the failed rebellion of the Paris Commune in 1871, as well as war. One photo shows scaffolding for the Pantheon after Prussian shelling. Changes in the medium run from paper positives and negatives, in the experiments of William Fox Talbot, through the silvery daguerreotypes of their namesake, Louis Jacque Mandé Daguerre, all the way to a portable Leica in the hands of André Kertész. They also include the emergence of photography as an art form, from Nadar to Henri Cartier-Bresson. The smaller show gives a full wall to Eugène Atget, with his unsettling contrasts between fog or reflections off a shop window and the row after row of products within. That show also ends with photography’s role in Surrealism, with Brassaï and May Ray.
Paris had a changing role in art as well—from the site of the official Salon to a gathering place for the avant-garde. Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz both found their way from America. Their photographs capture artist studios for Piet Mondrian and Constantin Brancusi, but not the artists. But then streets, too, are empty unless someone posed, at least in the earlier photographs, because long exposure times meant not a gentle blur of humanity as for Julia Margaret Cameron, but no traces of human traffic at all. In contrast to all these, Marville’s work seems clear, precise, artless, and a little dull. But then for an official photographer the devil is in the details, and his sympathies lay with the devil.
Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.