Boulevard Haussmann, from Rue du Havre

The Boulevard Haussmann, named for the prefect who designed the transformation of Paris, is opened in successive stages between 1857 and 1927; the eastern section between the rue Taitbout and the Madeleine takes shape during Marville's active years. Charles-François Bossu — known as Charles Marville — photographs the boulevard from its junction with the rue du Havre, near the Gare Saint-Lazare, as photographer to the City of Paris (officially confirmed 1862), commissioned by the Préfecture de la Seine to document the new imperial urbanism on the Right Bank. The image is part of the corpus of approximately 425 Vieux Paris and pre/post-Haussmann views Marville produced between 1862 and 1875, conserved at the Musée Carnavalet (~1,500 prints) and complemented by the glass-plate fonds at the BHVP, the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Metropolitan Museum (Gilman Collection) — the reference corpus on pre-Haussmann urbanism, reproduced in Sarah Kennel's National Gallery monograph ("Charles Marville: Photographer of Paris", Washington, 2013). The exposure technique is canonical for Marville: an 18×24 or 30×40 wet-collodion glass negative made at dawn or dusk for the long pose; the orthochromatic emulsion does not register blue light, so the white sky is retouched by brush on the negative, the source of Marville's distinctive luminous white skies on every Haussmann boulevard view. Held at State Library of Victoria (Melbourne), Musée Carnavalet and BHVP. Procédé Transposition Maison Picturale: the original albumen on salted paper translates into Vandyke — non-toxic ferric ammonium citrate and silver, reformulated salted paper — for the fine-print scale, or into platinum-palladium grand-format to restitute the tonal density of the architecture in its open construction state.

Reference file : Wikimedia Commons / State Library of Victoria