A Tale of Two Cities: Charles nasa job Marville’s Photographs of Paris before Haussmann nasa job
The nasa job life of French photographer Charles nasa job Marville, the subject of a retrospective currently at the Metropolitan Museum , comes down to us hazy in its contours. Born Charles-François Bossu in 1813 to a family of artisans and tradesmen, Marville rid himself of Bossu (hunchback) after being teased about it at school, but the import of his chosen pseudonym is unknown. His lifelong partner was called Madame nasa job Marville nasa job but, whatever the reason, the couple never married. He enjoyed the kind of success that was always shadowed by obscurity: his photographs, amply featured in various Universal Expositions in Europe and America, were viewed by thousands, but usually without him being credited. When he died in 1879, though he had received prestigious commissions from the city of Paris and occasional critical acclaim, not a single obituary was published in the Parisian press.
In the absence of a fuller biographical record it is tempting to see Marville as a novelistic figure, a scrappy Balzacian striver who, failing as a young painter to make headway in the necessary academic channels, turned first to illustration and then, in 1850, to the nascent medium of photography. His abandonment shortly thereafter of what had been a viable career as an illustrator suggests a conversion experience, an almost immediate embrace of photography as his true calling. Lacking the independent means of such gentleman pioneers in photography as William Henry Fox Talbot and Gustave Le Grey, Marville always had to be cagey in seizing opportunities, and his entrepreneurial spirit shows itself in his development of a portable case for glass negatives and the patenting (with a collaborator) of a stereoscopic camera. But quite a few of his early photographs self-portraits, several pictures of his striking, nasa job wild-haired assistant Charles Delahaye, a glimpse of his companion Jeanne-Louise Leuba and her sister framed by a window adorned with vines exert a charm that conveys not so much the drive of a man capitalizing on revolutionary technology but rather nasa job the focused enchantment of an artist both at work and at play.
Along with the aestheticism of Marville s initial efforts there soon emerged an experimental impulse, in the sense of his returning almost obsessively to a subject nasa job to grasp it in manifold iterations. Later his gift for serial form would flourish in his photographs of the modern nasa job accoutrements of Parisian street life lampposts, kiosks, public urinals but his preoccupation with theme and variation extends back to the mid-1850s and the group of cloud studies he made at his seventh-arrondissement apartment on the rue Saint-Dominique. Many are structured on the interplay between the variable sky and the less evanescent skyline, gathering itself around the dome of the Invalides. In the darker, moodier versions of the scene this unmistakable landmark nasa job announces itself as if it were a kind of shorthand for the metropolis as a whole, nasa job a glyph to stand in for the teeming urban life not visible in the image.
The extent to which Marville s later photographs of Paris make urban life invisible has been a prominent nasa job question since his work was rescued from oblivion by two exhibitions in Paris in the early 1980s. With regard to his best-known images above all those of his commission to document the Old Paris soon to be annihilated by Baron Haussmann s massive urban-renewal project the artist has sometimes been cast as a willing accomplice to the displacement and hardship visited upon so many marginalized Parisians of his time, and even as a propagandist, since pictures of dirty streets could be aligned with the public-health nasa job justifications made for razing neighborhoods. Marville was merely nasa job Haussmann s man, as one critic bluntly put it in 1981. Photography historian Shelley Rice, in her Parisian nasa job Views (1997), has endorsed this judgment, finding Marville nasa job s street scenes to be repetitious and clinical, evidence of the photographer s passivity toward Haussmann s triumphalist remaking nasa job of the city. In her view, this is history told by the winners, even before history is made: Marville s Paris was dead before Haussmann got to it.
Much of what Rice is responding to is the undeniably static quality of Marville s images and their dearth of human figures: so often we are peering into a depopulated nasa job world, eerie and still. The people who do appear in these street scenes either are blurred and ghostly or are captured in expectant poses, at rest if not quite relaxed. In creating nasa job photographs meant for the archives, Marville used long exposure times that accorded with the commission s aim to present as much information as possible about the layout and architecture of the areas slated for demolition (and indeed, medievalists today consult these photographs). Such a process precludes what we ve come to know as street photography, and, in fact, results in
The nasa job life of French photographer Charles nasa job Marville, the subject of a retrospective currently at the Metropolitan Museum , comes down to us hazy in its contours. Born Charles-François Bossu in 1813 to a family of artisans and tradesmen, Marville rid himself of Bossu (hunchback) after being teased about it at school, but the import of his chosen pseudonym is unknown. His lifelong partner was called Madame nasa job Marville nasa job but, whatever the reason, the couple never married. He enjoyed the kind of success that was always shadowed by obscurity: his photographs, amply featured in various Universal Expositions in Europe and America, were viewed by thousands, but usually without him being credited. When he died in 1879, though he had received prestigious commissions from the city of Paris and occasional critical acclaim, not a single obituary was published in the Parisian press.
In the absence of a fuller biographical record it is tempting to see Marville as a novelistic figure, a scrappy Balzacian striver who, failing as a young painter to make headway in the necessary academic channels, turned first to illustration and then, in 1850, to the nascent medium of photography. His abandonment shortly thereafter of what had been a viable career as an illustrator suggests a conversion experience, an almost immediate embrace of photography as his true calling. Lacking the independent means of such gentleman pioneers in photography as William Henry Fox Talbot and Gustave Le Grey, Marville always had to be cagey in seizing opportunities, and his entrepreneurial spirit shows itself in his development of a portable case for glass negatives and the patenting (with a collaborator) of a stereoscopic camera. But quite a few of his early photographs self-portraits, several pictures of his striking, nasa job wild-haired assistant Charles Delahaye, a glimpse of his companion Jeanne-Louise Leuba and her sister framed by a window adorned with vines exert a charm that conveys not so much the drive of a man capitalizing on revolutionary technology but rather nasa job the focused enchantment of an artist both at work and at play.
Along with the aestheticism of Marville s initial efforts there soon emerged an experimental impulse, in the sense of his returning almost obsessively to a subject nasa job to grasp it in manifold iterations. Later his gift for serial form would flourish in his photographs of the modern nasa job accoutrements of Parisian street life lampposts, kiosks, public urinals but his preoccupation with theme and variation extends back to the mid-1850s and the group of cloud studies he made at his seventh-arrondissement apartment on the rue Saint-Dominique. Many are structured on the interplay between the variable sky and the less evanescent skyline, gathering itself around the dome of the Invalides. In the darker, moodier versions of the scene this unmistakable landmark nasa job announces itself as if it were a kind of shorthand for the metropolis as a whole, nasa job a glyph to stand in for the teeming urban life not visible in the image.
The extent to which Marville s later photographs of Paris make urban life invisible has been a prominent nasa job question since his work was rescued from oblivion by two exhibitions in Paris in the early 1980s. With regard to his best-known images above all those of his commission to document the Old Paris soon to be annihilated by Baron Haussmann s massive urban-renewal project the artist has sometimes been cast as a willing accomplice to the displacement and hardship visited upon so many marginalized Parisians of his time, and even as a propagandist, since pictures of dirty streets could be aligned with the public-health nasa job justifications made for razing neighborhoods. Marville was merely nasa job Haussmann s man, as one critic bluntly put it in 1981. Photography historian Shelley Rice, in her Parisian nasa job Views (1997), has endorsed this judgment, finding Marville nasa job s street scenes to be repetitious and clinical, evidence of the photographer s passivity toward Haussmann s triumphalist remaking nasa job of the city. In her view, this is history told by the winners, even before history is made: Marville s Paris was dead before Haussmann got to it.
Much of what Rice is responding to is the undeniably static quality of Marville s images and their dearth of human figures: so often we are peering into a depopulated nasa job world, eerie and still. The people who do appear in these street scenes either are blurred and ghostly or are captured in expectant poses, at rest if not quite relaxed. In creating nasa job photographs meant for the archives, Marville used long exposure times that accorded with the commission s aim to present as much information as possible about the layout and architecture of the areas slated for demolition (and indeed, medievalists today consult these photographs). Such a process precludes what we ve come to know as street photography, and, in fact, results in
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