Having been the subject of an exhibition last September in Washington, Charles Marville, the photographer of 19th century Paris, is moving to New York. One hundred black-and-white photographs, many of which are on loan from the Musée Carnavalet, the Musée d’Orsay and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, will be on display at the Metropolitan Museum through May 4, 2014. An engraver by trade, he turned to photography in 1850. Marville (1813-1879), born Charles-François Bossu, photographed Paris in those years , immortalizing its bridges and quays, its mazes of cobblestone streets, its rundown buildings and dozens of passageways that have since disappeared.
Ten years later, he was hired by the city to document Old Paris, which would soon be transformed by Baron Haussmann’s radical renovation of the city. The exhibition ranges from his early attempts to his final photos of Paris and its new districts on the outskirts where Marville, “casts a critical eye on the consequences of such a dramatic change,” says curator Sarah Kennel.
Viewers will discover his photographs of architecture, monuments, landscapes and, above all, the city of Paris, from the modest dwellings on the banks of the Bièvre River, which then ran through the fifth arrondissement, to the city hall in ruins after a,fire in 1871 , as well as the building of the Avenue de l’Opéra. It’s a Paris that locals today wouldn’t recognize, the Paris before the grand projects of Napoleon III.
“Marville was the first major photographs of Paris and he captured the city in all its complexity, in the middle of this incredible transformation,” says Kennel. Strikingly, he photographs the slums at the top of the Rue Champlain, in the 20th arrondissement, where the poor have arrived en masse, pushed to the edge of the city by the construction, the reflection of a violent change. It offers an illustration of these two cities, so different and so hostile to each other: the city of luxury, and the city of poverty surrounding it. His work is more than a series of historical documents. It also conveys, according to Kennel, “the sensibility of a man who wanted to make his mark.”
EXHIBITION
Charles Marville: Photographer of Paris
Until May 4th, 2014
Metropolitan Museum de New York
1000 5th Ave
New York, NY 10028
(212) 535-7710
