Le Nouveau Paris: Charles Marville Photographs the City Transformation

The name of Charles Marville is inextricably bound up with Le Vieux Paris, the medieval city with its twisting streets and alleyways that was demolished to make way for Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s straight, wide boulevards. He extensively documented this drastic transformation in a number of photography assignments, that depicts not just the old city but the New Paris, Paris Nouveau, as well.

For volume 18 of the Rijksmuseum Studies in Photography Joke de Wolf studied three of these assignments, based on photographs from the Rijksmuseum collection.