Charles Marville

Charles Marville began as an illustrator and engraver before turning to photography^*1. When Haussmann began rebuilding Paris under Napoleon III, Marville was commissioned to photograph neighborhoods before demolition as part of the city's modernization program^*2. Those images were meant as administrative records, but they became something more lasting: an archive of the urban memory that modernization erased. Marville systematically photographed areas around Notre-Dame, the Ile de la Cite, and Les Halles, leaving one of the great visual records of disappearing nineteenth-century Paris^*1. His work is often cited as an early documentary paradox in which an official commission ends up preserving what official policy destroys^*2.