In 1865, Charles Marville was engaged by the Historical Works Commission to photograph parts of Paris threatened by sweeping urban redevelopment. Marville-Paris sets that commission within a broader account of his work in the city, bringing together the old streets marked for disappearance, views made in the early 1850s, and later images of the transformed capital. Published by Hazan in French in 1994, the substantial volume presents Paris not as a fixed monument but as a place being dismantled, regulated, and rebuilt.

Marville’s photographs are distinguished by their descriptive precision and measured distance. Narrow streets, façades, intersections, and public works are treated as structures to be read rather than scenery to be romanticized. The book also encompasses assignments made for the City of Paris under Prefect Haussmann: studies of lamp posts, urinals, benches, gates, parks, garden squares, and parts of the Bois de Boulogne. These objects reveal modernization at the scale of everyday use, where civic policy became visible in metalwork, street furniture, circulation, and space.

The selection extends beyond the image of a vanished city. Its concluding emphasis on new arteries—including the Avenue de l’Opéra and Boulevard de Sébastopol—places destruction beside replacement. Old Paris and new Paris consequently appear as related photographic subjects, allowing Marville’s controlled method to register both historical loss and the emerging visual order of the modern capital.

For a serious collection, the book’s importance lies in this breadth and juxtaposition. Across 450 pages, architectural photography, urban record, and municipal commission meet within one sustained study of nineteenth-century Paris. It offers a concentrated way to examine how early photography served preservation, administration, and the representation of change, while retaining the formal clarity of Marville’s own practice.