"Charles Marville, Photographer of Paris"

The Met revisits the work of French photographer Charles Marville (1813–1879), who, in 1862, was appointed the official photographer of the city of Paris, tasked with documenting Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann's radical modernization of the French capital. Haussmann created Paris's famed boulevards by plowing under the city's medieval-era neighborhoods, and Marville was there, capturing both the destruction of the old and the emergence of the new. His images of ancient twisting streets and alleyways awaiting the wrecking ball anticipated Eugène Atget's famed photos of similar subjects by more than a decade.