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Piercing Time: Paris After Marville and Atget 1865-2012
By Peter Sramek Intellect Ltd
Copyright © 2013 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78320-033-7
CHAPTER 1
A Paris Diagonal
Peter Sramek
The Second Empire period, which saw the urban renewal of Paris under Napoleon III and his Prefect, Georges-Eugène Haussmann, also gave rise to the photographic record which Charles Marville was commissioned to complete. His documentation of the streets slated for demolition led to a methodical recording of Paris as it existed in the mid-1860s. The scale and particularity of this project was unprecedented in the field of urban photography. Artists using drawing, engraving or watercolour had of course done similar illustrative documentation, so the idea of producing a systematic visual record was not new. Putting photography to this task heralded a new world for documenting human endeavours. Peter Barberie (2007), in his work on Marville's earlier commission to photograph the renewed Bois de Boulogne, deconstructs the vision and meanings behind such photographic documentation. When considering urban documentation in particular, other examples of extensive projects also exist elsewhere, such as in the collection of the Fratelli Alinari Studio in Florence, which, although working later in the century, provides an example of a systematic recording of art and monumental architecture, in this case to build a collection of views for commercial sale. The concept of cataloguing, prevalent in this time, was applied naturally to the new medium of photography, which could so readily be put to the task of producing a visual record to be classified, categorized and collected.
Planned urban change by edict was well-known in Paris long before Louis Napoleon drew lines on his great map of the city. Going back to Charles V (1364-1380) and his establishing of the Administration des Bâtiments Royaux (Tung 2001: 292) one can trace urban projects initiated by a series of monarchs. One thinks of the creation of the place des Vosges in 1605 and the rue de Rivoli in 1801. Tung (2001: 277) points out that '[t]he general concept of comprehensive planning was associated with the exercise of absolute autocratic power' and this was an underlying understanding as Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann took control of Paris. Nonetheless, the creation of new mandated streets under Haussmann, with his severe cutting through of existing buildings, had never been experienced on such a scale. It is no surprise that photography was engaged to record such radical urban change.
More unusual in the context of such dramatic urban planning may be Marville's assigned task of documenting the old before it disappeared, rather than representing the process of renewal itself. However, interest in 'Old Paris' was not new when Marville was commissioned by the Services des Travaux Historiques. This department was created in 1865 under Napoleon III and immediately undertook a compendium publication on vieux Paris. Photographs and engravings were to play an important role in this publication. This was later abandoned in 1871 with the fall of the Second Empire and the materials dispersed to various archives, including the Musée Carnavalet. It is unclear if Marville was directly involved in any way with this project, but it reflects the interest in documenting historical Paris even in the midst of a push to modernize. Despite his radical approach to urban renovation, Haussmann displayed an interest in preserving a record of the past, suggesting the purchase of the Hôtel Carnavalet to establish a new museum of the history of the city. Although we now equate old photographs with a nostalgia for and romantic vision of the past, these sensibilities were present in Paris before the birth of the medium that could stop time so eloquently. The 1830s had seen a rising consciousness of issues related to preservation and there was a growing concern with the loss of the character of the city. In 1831, Victor Hugo had published Notre-Dame de Paris ('The Hunchback of Notre Dame') in which he rails against the degradation of historical architecture:
There remains today but a very imperceptible vestige of the Place de Grève, such as it existed then; it ... would soon have disappeared, perhaps submerged by that flood of new houses which so rapidly devours all the ancient façades of Paris. (Book 2, Chapter II)
If we had leisure to examine with the reader, one by one, the diverse traces of destruction imprinted upon the old church, time's share would be the least, the share of men the most, especially the men of art, since there have been individuals who assumed the title of architects during the last two centuries ... The centuries, the revolutions, which at least devastate with impartiality and grandeur, have been joined by a cloud of school architects, licensed, sworn, and bound by oath; defacing with the discernment and choice of bad taste. (Book 3, Chapter I)
There were those of course who championed the modern future of the city and for them the photograph represented the new industrial age, an age of scientific certainties and observable proofs. With its ability to record detail in such a 'scientific' manner, it is no surprise that photography was so quickly engaged to both capture the old and herald the new. The impetus to have Marville record the streets about to be demolished may just as likely have been motivated by the desire to preserve proof of positive change as to build a visual record of heritage lost. With attitudes prevalent on both sides, photography could provide material for either. Under Haussmann, Marville was only commissioned to photograph the old, rather than to record the forward march of demolition and reconstruction. Demolitions only come to the fore in his images from the late 1870s, when he was asked by the city to photograph for the Universal Exposition. For this commission, the objective was explicitly to illustrate modernization and he photographed new boulevards across Paris and the, then current, demolitions for the completion of the avenue de l'Opéra (see Le Gall in this volume).
When viewed today, Marville's photographs provide a comprehensive visual record of Paris as it existed at this focal point of change. Unlike maps, with their quasi-temporal layers of information and their distillation of location into line, photographs show what was there in front of the lens – at least the stationary elements. The world of the past can still be read in the buildings, the signage, the mix of old and new and the evidence of demolition and new construction.
The selection of sites for this rephotographic project involved a careful review of the prints in the Musée Carnavalet related to Marville's topographic survey commission. What became evident, on visiting the locations, was that changes have occurred in different forms at various times over the last 150 years. In some locations, wholesale demolition in the 1860s and 1870s resulted in total alteration of the architecture and street configurations, as in the avenue de l'Opéra. In other quarters, such as the slopes of Montagne Ste-Geneviève, some streets have changed little over the centuries. In his later commission in the mid-1870s, Marville photographed the broad, empty boulevards, newly completed. Although very much the same today, these are now filled with motorized traffic. Les Halles was rebuilt in the nineteenth century and then experienced major demolitions in the 1970s. Now, in 2012, this heart of the city has once again seen renovation. In planning my trajectory, I decided to find sites which provided this range of histories and chose to mimic the form of Haussmann's percements, taking a broad diagonal, covering quartiers which have seen a variety of transformations. The term percement or 'piercing' was applied to the approach used in Haussmann's pattern of driving new, straight streets through the existing, more irregular, network with little regard for the existing configurations. Following the concept of the percement, I traced a diagonal which crosses the heart of the old city, encompassing neighbourhoods completely rebuilt by Haussmann and those which managed to escape, some only to experience great change later on. My attempt was to remake all of the Marville images along this broad diagonal. The drawing of a line came to represent the act of walking across Paris, but was also borrowed from an archaeological strategy, whereby the revelations of a strategically-selected cross section can represent the totality of a site. The choice of a comprehensive selection of images reflected a nineteenth-century belief in cataloguing empirical, 'scientific' data. And, yet again, the concept of a percement represented a slice through time based on a comparison of Marville with Atget, and with today. With such an approach, layers beyond the merely photographic and descriptive begin to open – historical, cultural, social, and political.
To engage physically with urban space means to move through configurations of buildings and streets and the best way to know Paris is to walk. Anthony Tung suggests,
Paris was designed to be experienced from its streets. One discovers the notes of its architectural symphony simply by walking – in virtually any direction ... Paris developed over several centuries as it grew from a medieval town to the cultural and political center of Europe in the Age of Enlightenment and, finally, in the era of industrialization, a city of tree-lined boulevards, unified streetscapes, and magnificent vistas ... (Tung 2001: 287)
In developing Piercing Time, I chose to walk my diagonal through the centre of the city. One sees, street by street, where changes have occurred, buildings demolished, new configurations constructed or, conversely, the old Paris spared, still visible under the embellishments of age and contemporary life. The passage of time is palpable as one unravels interlacings of stasis and change. Although change is seen in all cities, this is particularly visible in Paris because the organic structure of older street patterns is intercut with the sudden disruption of a newer conception of urban organization which the Haussmann plan brought in the 1850s-1860s. A combination of photographs, maps and one's physical presence allows one to understand this often confusing network as layers in time. By chance, my selection of a diagonal roughly coincides with a path which Haussmann himself walked as a young student and which he describes in his memoirs. For him, just as for the legendary flâneurs (Gluck 2005), walking through the city allowed for observation and contemplation.
Visual documentation of architecture usually accompanies urban development, both in the presentation of proposed projects and in the recording of the completed works. Urban planning itself, especially on the scale that Napoleon III and Haussmann undertook, requires spaces to be coherently documented in visual form in order to explain, justify and record both proposed and completed projects. Maps and drawings have long provided such visualization tools, ideally supported by the use of surveys. By the mid-nineteenth century, photography was able to function as an additional tool with its convincing detail and sense of presence. Charles Marville was one of the first to be commissioned to use the camera to create such an extensive urban documentation in the context of urban planning. We now take such documentary images for granted but, when he set out in 1865 to record the vast network of streets, he must have faced the challenge of how to structure a representation of the city. He most certainly required a coherent system appropriate for the commission, just as his cumbersome photographic process needed an efficient methodology to make so many exposures. Without it, the sheer number of possible images would make the project insurmountable or chaotic at best. At the very least, his project could not be based on simply selecting the photogenic. Marville did have earlier experience documenting the renovated Bois de Boulogne where the idea of moving through the park was used to organize his subsequent albums (Barberie 2007). Judging by the ordering of the portfolios in the Musée Carnavalet, it appears as though a topographic sequence was followed in shooting the images of 1865, but this is not certain.
For the photographer today, the concept of moving through an environment in a series of views seems logical as a working process, and as a presentation sequence. In the photography of cities one finds other precedents. Eugène Atget had his methodical approach of photographing progressively along a street (Harris 1999); Josef Sudek (1959) sequenced his book Praha Panoramitická as though one were walking through the city. Today, 150 years after Marville, we are also used to the common cinematic tropes in which the camera moves us visually through a space in a continuous flow, as though we were physically present and walking ourselves. In shooting the contemporary photographs for Piercing Time, this concept of movement, so central to the experiencing of urban space, informed both the selection of images to be remade and the progress of photographing. Following the chosen route, the 183 rephotographs made here represent nearly all of the images which Marville took along, or near to, the chosen diagonal.
CHAPTER 2
Rephotographic Practices
Peter Sramek
Rephotography in its contemporary usage is a process by which one consciously repeats earlier photographic moments in revisiting their locations and setting the camera in the same position, deliberately and as accurately as possible. The framework of rephotography as a conceptual practice forms the basis of the contemporary photographs in this collection and provides the rationale for juxtaposing the images. The act of remaking Marville's images developed my understanding of his methodology while consideration of how Marville and Atget recorded urban change led to my thinking about how their approaches differed, despite superficial similarities. Ultimately, the progressive photographing of the same locations by the three photographers forms an historical timeline, allowing for study of the sites themselves.
Rephotography is a well-established practice today, with a wide range of exemplars from the highly accurate and scholarly to the popular and touristic. Most contemporary art projects essentially consider the nature of photographic documentation and its ability to record time. In returning to historical materials, one can address a range of concepts about stasis and change, human activity, geological time, memory, the historical significance of place, and more. Rephotography leads to questions about why it was important to photograph a particular scene at the time, what factors influenced how it was represented and what it means to re-do it now.
Although one thinks of major rephotographic concepts as entering the art vernacular with Mark Klett's rephotographic survey of the American west, Second View (Klett 1990), there are earlier books which have used rephotography as a structure, such as Yvan Christ's Les métamorphoses de Paris from 1967. Christ commissioned photographers to revisit old photographs of Paris, including many by Marville. And, because Marville's images are so central to visualizing nineteenth-century Paris, they have often been used to illustrate travel guides and histories of the city. Guidebooks such as Leonard Pitt's Walks through Lost Paris (2006; see also 2008) draw heavily on historical photographs and Pitt supports his suggested walks with his own contemporary images of the sites, providing excellent descriptions of the architectural details found in the old photographs. In addition to these examples, many publications using new photographs of old views are found in popular or touristic media. These are about satisfying our seemingly universal desire to see 'then and now' and support historical descriptions of places and events. Unfortunately, many do not respect the integrity of the originals and often crop them severely, so the potential for study of the photographs themselves is limited. This present volume aims to reproduce the historical images as accurately as possible so that it may be used for further academic inquiry.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Piercing Time: Paris After Marville and Atget 1865-2012 by Peter Sramek. Copyright © 2013 Intellect Ltd. Excerpted by permission of Intellect Ltd.
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