Boulevard Saint-Germain

The Boulevard Saint-Germain pierces the Left Bank between 1855 and 1877 as one of the longest east-west percées of Baron Haussmann's plan, cutting through the medieval quarters of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the Quartier latin, and the Faubourg Saint-Germain. Charles-François Bossu — known as Charles Marville — photographs the boulevard while the works are still open, in his role as official photographer to the City of Paris (1862-1879), under direct commission of the Préfecture de la Seine to document the new imperial urbanism. The frame is the natural editorial pendant of his Vieux Paris views: where the medieval streets show the city before demolition, this image shows the city in its becoming, the open construction state that defined imperial modernity. The image belongs to the corpus of approximately 425 Vieux Paris and Haussmann-era views Marville produced between 1862 and 1875, conserved at the Musée Carnavalet (~1,500 prints), the BHVP (glass plates) and the Bibliothèque nationale de France — reproduced in Sarah Kennel's National Gallery monograph ("Charles Marville: Photographer of Paris", Washington, 2013). Marville exposes an 18×24 or 30×40 wet-collodion glass negative at dawn for the long pose; the orthochromatic emulsion cannot register blue light and the sky is retouched by brush on the negative, the source of Marville's distinctive luminous white skies. Held at the State Library of Victoria (Melbourne), the Musée Carnavalet, the BHVP and the Metropolitan Museum (Gilman Collection). 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 modular fine-print, or into platinum-palladium grand-format when the architectural scale of the boulevard demands the full tonal density and matte permanence of the platinum process.

Reference file : Wikimedia Commons / State Library of Victoria