Charles Marville: Photographer of ParisBy Sarah Kennell et al.University of Chicago, 2013
I don’t want to make a habit of acknowledging exhibits that have passed from our sight, but I’d like to make an exception with Charles Marville: Photographer of Paris. The Paris these photos depict, one which was passing out of existence even as Marville worked, is so perfectly documented that the exhibit which has closed (and the catalogue that remains) both fulfill and transcend Marville’s purpose.Marville’s photography brings Eugène Atget to mind, but only because of both men’s attachment to the more ephemeral aspects of the city they learned to love each in their different ways, as commissioned photographers of Paris. Atget was a much younger man for whom photography was an established technology, as well as an emerging profession. Marville took up photography in its infancy and helped, as he mastered its quirky mechanics, to legitimize it. In 1850, when he began, nobody was making claims about photography’s threat to painting, though they would soon enough. Unlike artist-photographers whose switch from easel to darkroom (here Alfred Steiglitz comes to mind) could be worrisome, once Marville hit his stride, he never broke it. And while his subjects necessitated formats that seem, after a series of cobblestone alleys that meander through barrow-wide streets, repetitive, he hurries us over to a comfort-station at an urban crossroad that is otherwise unremarkable.Marville’s attention to the city’s gas-lamps is elegantly straightforward; yet, like minor characters who unexpectedly captivate us, they become protagonists that supersede what is normally striking. In these photographs, Marville compresses the viewer’s depth of field, which is, as a rule, a wanderer.Marville’s sense of nostalgia is mediated by a stern compositor, who understands salient features; eliminates anecdotes; and freezes time in a way that photographs do less often than they should. Marville’s most emblematic images have a lasting resonance. He is never the studio photographer who can not only control, but artificializes his subjects. He searches, not only for a subject, but for a moment in time that will pass for thousands of others. And it is within this moment that he gives us something that endures.The Washington road-show closed January 5th, 2015. It traveled to the Metropolitan Museum and, finally, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, where it was taken down in September of that year. Charles Marville: Photographer of Paris is, to my mind, significant enough to justify the afterthought I wish to impose, for the first time, on my readers.America’s tradition of documentary photography has been so thoroughly assimilated that it needs no introduction. Photographers like Berenice Abbott, who were charged with the almost impossible task of creating emblematic images of New York City, might be considered the mothers and fathers of all documentarians. (Historians of our Westward expansion might take issue. It could be argued that documentary photographers cut their teeth on Yellowstone and other unlikely places.) In their wake, an eager multitude scattered in all directions, creating similar portfolios for the Works Progress Administration – though, sometimes, as independent projects. The Depression years spawned some of our most iconic imagery: Lewis Hine’s skyscraper acrobats; Dorothea Lange’s mother-of-the-prairie, wizened way beyond her years; the street-life of Paul Strand; Helen Levitt’s indomitable citizens, who probably have less moxie than they’re trying to project. Martin Lewis’s etchings fill in the blanks while Edward Hopper’s streetscapes show us that places that teem with activity are essentially alienating.Marville came to photography at a time when his native Paris was in the process of re-making itself. At King Louis-Philippe’s behest, and with Baron Haussmann’s vision of a city of wide boulevards and monumental buildings, the Paris of Victor Hugo and Honore de Balzac was not swept away, but it was sweepingly diminished. In an attempt to create a more sanitized city, Haussmann cleared hundreds of blocks whose provincial character no longer suited a world capital that would become a showplace in years to come. Haussmann wanted right angles and hospital corners. He wanted to get rid of the seamy and the strange. He was clearly repelled by the medieval squalor of a city where dead horses were commonplace; tanneries stank up adjacent neighborhoods; and a riot of words and images disfigured buildings that leaned against each other. His vision was, however, rooted in an aesthetic consciousness – which could not be said of the last generation of American Urban renewal, which swept away without re-planting. Or built a highway where a parish church and thriving neighborhood had been seized by the law of eminent domain.Into this ferment came Charles Marville with a technique that had staked its claim on more conventional subjects, but had bided its time constructively. When, in the late 1850’s, he was commissioned to photograph the Bois de Boulogne, a royal playground that was appointed with the architectural bric-a-brac that lost its whimsy when Frederick Law Olmstead decided Central Park needed some of it, he was on his way to becoming Paris’ official photographer. In the meanwhile, he could amuse himself with pastoral subjects that paid the bills. And would ingratiate himself with Parisian bureaucrats. When Haussmann’s picks and shovels began their work, Marville was ready to chronicle them.And what a chronicle he made! Some of his photographs suggest a nod to the etcher Charles Meryon, Paris’ most macabre interpreter, who was in love with the city’s majesty – even as long shadows fell across its busy streets and dead bodies were being transported from hospital to graveyard. Meryon’s Paris showed theCity of Light dragging behind a hearse; staring, in the company of a gargoyle, into the warrens of Vieux Paris; dumbstruck with grandeur, yet worrying about the rent.Marville’s Paris is more practical, yet its poetry is always hovering around an iron gate, a splendid lamp-post, a rough-and-tumble pissoir. His Paris resonates with footfalls that have just skimmed along the cobblestones; marketplaces without any produce; yellow-stone facades the sun has blanched for centuries. He speaks of hushed courtyards; dilapidated art-studios; faded grandeur that cannot, and will not, be saved. He is at once elegiac and accepting. He knows what he photographs has been slated for destruction, yet takes pleasure, not only in the act of seeing it for the last time, but photographing it for ages to come.No photographer has designed more effective street-scenes and few painters have been able to articulate mass and the miniscule, strength and delicacy, now and always, with the unassuming grace Charles Marville brought to every nook and cranny of a place he came to love so well.Marville may have been inspired by Italian printmaker Giambattista Piranesi’s harrowing visions of prisons without exits or entrances – which are metaphorically in synch with a city whose portals were being re-situated. During photography’s infancy, painters and etchers were all a nascent practitioner had. It is interesting to note that Carceri d’invenzione (Imaginary Prisons), the work for which Piranesi is most celebrated, was published in multiple volumes at a time when Marville was at a very susceptible age and was very likely influenced by it. Charles Meryon certainly was, as was Baudelaire, who became Meryon’s champion.Marville’s Piranesian meditations on destruction versus regeneration change and its sometime-adversary, rebirth, were new to photography. He was one of the first photographers to document the wholesale revitalization of a place that needed to be knocked down before it could get on its feet again. Haussmann created what the impressionists painted, but Marville was there to show us what would have hampered our view of the Opera, say, or some other out-of-scale object that might please the eye and shake the senses. (I prefer pre-Haussmann Paris in this regard.)He also shows us the effects of war. During the Prussian Siege of Paris in 1870, a great many public buildings, including the Hotel de Ville, were damaged or destroyed. Marville gives us the latter structure as a kind of “proud, but bowed” remnant of the horrors of invasion. It is clear, in Marville’s rendering, that the shells that tore through its façade kept going; that the fires that gutted it could not be put out; and that there might not be enough to save.In the 1870’s, the poet, Paul Verlaine, was a loafing bureaucrat of a type that would have been familiar to readers of Charivari, who were delighted and dismayed by Honore Daumier’s cartoons. For the most part, Verlaine and his ilk leaned against doorjambs, shrugged off the reports they were supposed to be sprucing up, and fraternized along the grandly appointed corridors at the Hotel de Ville, which was Paris’ equivalent of City Hall. Those German shells would find their mark sometime after Verlaine had quit his job – or been drummed out of it. Other poets and writers had passed through its doors before it had posed for Marville’s camera. The present structure could not be rehabilitated and was replaced.The ravages of war were replicated in an urban renewal program that gutted the medieval Paris Eugene Atget roamed with the cumbersome equipment with which he is, for better or worse, identified. (Like Atget, who came to photography after he left the stage, Marville was a somewhat late bloomer.) Construction de l’avenue de l’Opera shows workmen blasting through Vieux Paris with hammers and chisels. Heaps of brick pile up as an historical fabric is swept away; granite piers are stranded, as if mere stone-breakers cannot pull them down; and, in the distance, small white-washed houses await the dismantling that is as brisk as it is back-breaking. No stories have been told of the worker-bees who would raze one city to make a new one – unless Balzac made minor characters of them. (Of these characters’ presence, I can only guess. Balzac’s comedie humaine is, like Atget’s backpack, as cumbersome a thing as a small mountain of albumenized glass-plates).Marville was perfectly suited to the task to which he was assigned and he made it his own.Let me close with another apology for neglecting this exhibit while it still around. For reasons I may never articulate, I wanted to talk about it after the fact.The exhibition is closed, but its catalog remains and I’d heartily recommend it. I saw the Marville exhibit in Washington DC and I would, in a general sense, urge my fellow Washingtonians to regard their own city as a place that has always been under siege. While its 19th-century fabric is still visible and its height restrictions have been fortunately maintained, it is a graveyard of intentions, good and bad. It has been mined for its property values and it has been misused by developers. The K Street of the 1890’s is as inconceivable as a Grecian temple, as is the Pennsylvania Avenue that existed before the Federal Triangle. Washington was designed by a master, but the master plan has been taxed and traduced over the years by ill-conceived expansions and wholesale slaughter. Marville’s Paris might be seen as the cautionary tale we never listened to or heard, like a warning shot, from afar. Marville wanted us to know what we’ve lost, possibly as a means to motivate us to preserve the best of what is left. We are beginning to learn this lesson in DC and I hope that those who are re-shaping the city are mindful of what it cannot replace, rebuild, or re-imagine.
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Brett Busang has contributed articles, reviews, and profiles to such publications as
New York Press,
The Bloomsbury Review,
Footnotes,
Loch Raven Review and numerous others. He is also a painter whose work has been widely, if haphazardly, collected.
