c. 1877Paris

Avenue de l’Opéra — demolition

Charles Marville

Street photograph

What this plate shows

The cut for the Avenue de l’Opéra: a street of houses opened, timber shores, rubble, a camera standing in the demolition. Marville recorded what Haussmann’s boulevards destroyed. Street photography of unmaking. Not an overview of Paris.

Image type: Street photograph
Source: J. Paul Getty Museum / Brown University Library; Wikimedia scan.
License: Public domain.

Same city, two kinds

Nadar’s balloon plate of the Étoile beside Marville’s street record of a boulevard being cut. Overview is not demolition. Both are photographs.

Beside 1868 · True aerial photograph

Chronologies

Marville recorded the cut. A later camera recorded the new avenue looking toward Palais Garnier. A photograph of the streets that stood there before the cut is not in this archive. The hole stays.
Paris — Avenue de l’Opéra

Collections where this plate appears

02Old World photographyStreet scenes, demolition, construction, rooftops, a dome, a completed boulevard. The camera on the ground or on a known high point — not a lithograph pretending to be a lens.