Rue du Haut-Moulin, from the Flower Market

Photographed from the Marché aux Fleurs side of the Île de la Cité, the Rue du Haut-Moulin belongs to the medieval lacework of streets erased between 1860 and 1868 to open the access to the new Tribunal de Commerce and the Boulevard du Palais. The view is part of the Album du Vieux Paris that Charles-François Bossu — known as Charles Marville — assembled as photographer to the City of Paris (officially appointed 1862) under the salvage mandate of Baron Haussmann's prefecture; the album, deposited at the Hôtel de Ville, gathered the photographic record of streets condemned to disappear. Between 1862 and 1875 Marville produced approximately 425 such Vieux Paris views, donated to the municipal archive and now held by the Musée Carnavalet (~1,500 prints), the Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris (BHVP, several hundred glass plates) and the Bibliothèque nationale de France — the reference corpus on pre-Haussmann urbanism, reproduced in Sarah Kennel's National Gallery monograph ("Charles Marville: Photographer of Paris", Washington, 2013). Marville exposes a wet-collodion glass negative in an 18×24 view camera at dawn or dusk; the long exposure smooths foot traffic and the cobblestones read with documentary precision. The orthochromatic collodion does not register blue light, so the sky is rendered as a flat white and routinely retouched by brush on the negative — a Marville signature on every street view. Procédé Transposition Maison Picturale: the original albumen on salted paper translates faithfully into a modern Vandyke print — non-toxic ferric ammonium citrate and silver, reformulated salted paper — or into platinum-palladium when the client commissions a large-format restitution of the street's compressed medieval geometry and its narrow horizon.

Reference file : Wikimedia Commons / Musée Carnavalet