I imagine that the US the National Gallery of Art in Washington is currently closed (I’m writing this on 1 Oct 2013) courtesy of the US Republican Tea Party’s opposition to heath care. I can’t at all understand their opposition to what appears to be a very sensible if rather limited measure on public healthcare, any more than I can understand the current UK government’s push to privatise our NHS here – now well under way through various back doors. As a great supporter of our NHS I was sorry not to be at the march on Sunday when over 50,000 people went to Manchester to show their support. Or as one presenter on our BBC radio – once another great British institution but now sadly compromised in its coverage of UK events – put it ‘some people say as many as ten thousand‘. If the police estimate was 50,000, you can be sure it was rather more.
Assuming at some point before January 5, 2014 US Republicans come to their senses and allow US Museums to reopen, those within travelling distance of Washington should make for the exhibition Charles Marville: Photographer of Paris which opened there on 29 September, the first major US showing of his work with a hundred photographs. The NGA page also has a link to a good set of 18 photographs, Paris in Transition, including work by Marville and others. It says the show is in association with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and a search on their site reveals around 20 works by Marville with images on line.
Back to public radio, NPR (it does photograph much better than the BBC) has a good report on the show by Susan Stamberg talking with curator Sarah Kennel, who has also produced what appears to be a very fine book, Charles Marville, Photographer of Paris, published by the University of Chicago Press (available in the UK in a couple of weeks.) The web site has a dozen large images from the book.
There is a good article about the book and the show by Luc Sante on The New York Review of Books, again with a gallery of images, and there are more pictures by Marville at MoMA and on Luminous Lint. Commercially many of his images are available in digital format through the Roger Viollet gallery, but I could only manage to see these as small thumbnails.
Also on line is a map of Paris with pins on it locating the sites where around 150 of his pictures were made, clicking on which gives a small version of both his image and a modern view from a similar position. There is also a PDF by Martin H. Krieger of the University of Southern California which explains the how and why this map was made.
[There may be collections of Marville’s work available on line from the large holdings of some Paris museums, but the French cultural establishment’s peculiar relationship with the Internet leads them to set up impenetrable web sites, perhaps stemming from their view of it as an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ institution and a devotion to a peculiar logic which requires a French education to understand – and certainly defeats Google. Should anyone manage to find any, please post links in a comment below.]
Marville who became the official ‘Photographer of the City of Paris‘ is deservedly well-known for his roughly 500 images commissioned by the Commission Municipale des Travaux Historiques of Paris before and after the great programme of works before and after the ‘improvements’ made by Haussman. The great boulevards were pierced through the city, designed to allow free movement of troops to put down the frequent insurrections by the people of Paris. The narrow streets which they replaced were far too easily barricaded.
For many, including myself, this work has an added interest because of the work of a later photographer of Paris, Eugène Atget, for whom, despite my comments above, the BnF has a good web site, and even available in an English (US) version (and in French only, Regards sur la ville.). Many of Marville’s better images are indeed hard to distinguish from the work of Atget, although as the latter site comments, while Atget shows only the ruins and destruction of a gutted city, Marville has an interest in its reconstruction.
Apart from some of those images of Paris, much of Marville’s work leaves me unmoved. The simple records of church doorways and statues fail to go beyond that, technically proficient but unless you have a particular interest in the thing photographed, rather boring. I want more from photographs.