Two plates, as made
Paris
Street photograph beside true aerial photograph. Do not treat them as the same kind of evidence.
c. 1877·Paris
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.
1868·Paris
Aerial view of Paris — Place de l’Étoile
Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon), from Henri Giffard’s tethered balloon.
True aerial photograph
What this plate shows
A camera in a balloon. The Arc de Triomphe sits in the star of new avenues Haussmann cut from the Étoile. Rooftops and roadbeds are seen from above, not imagined from above. BnF preserves a plate of eight views Nadar took from this tethered balloon in 1868. This is a true aerial photograph — the first surviving generation of Paris from the air.
- Image type
- True aerial photograph
- Source
- Brown University Library; Wikimedia Commons file of the 1868 balloon exposure.
- License
- Public domain (Nadar died 1910; published nineteenth century).