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Piercing Time examines the role of photography in documenting urban change by juxtaposing contemporary 'rephotographs' taken by the author with images of nineteenth-century Paris taken by Charles Marville, who worked under Georges Haussmann, and corresponding photographs by Eugène Atget taken in the early twentieth century. Revisiting the sites of Marville's photographs with a black cloth, tripod and view camera, Peter Sramek creates here a visually stunning book that investigates how urban development, the use of photography as a documentary medium and the representation of urban space reflect attitudes towards the city. The essays that run alongside these fascinating images discuss subjects such as the aesthetics of ruins and the documentation of the demolitions that preceded Haussmannization, as well as the different approaches taken by Marville and Atget to their work. The book also includes contemporary interviews with local Parisians, extracts from Haussmann's own writing and historical maps that allow for an intriguing look at the shifting city plan. Sure to be of interest to lovers of the city, be they Parisians or visitors, Piercing Time provides a unique snapshot of historical changes of the past 150 years. But it will also be of enduring value to scholars. The accurate cataloguing and high quality reproductions of the images make it a resource for a significant portion of the Marville collection in the Musée Carnavalet, and it will aid further research in urban history and change in Paris over the past century and a half. Photographers will be drawn to the book for its new thinking in relation to documentary methodologies.

That was the Paris of Victor Hugo and \"Les Miserables,\" which Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann, Napoleon III's planning czar, was sweeping away to make room for the glittery, bourgeois metropolis of today. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a great show of [Charles Marville]'s photographs from back then, when luxury apartment buildings were replacing old shops and homes, and many working people could no longer afford to live in their own neighborhoods. I wonder, here in the early third, whether photographers are now out and about, in the spirit of Marville, documenting parts of today's big cities. Cities change. That's urban life. But the best cities don't leave the vulnerable behind. About 20,000 working poor were said to have lost their homes on the Ile de la Cite when Haussmann's renewal forced them out. Centuries-old tanneries along the Bievre -- the impoverished \"faubourg of misery,\" as it was called, but a community rich in history and pride -- got the boot, too. Marville photographed a few of their new homes on the city's outskirts, like the fetid shantytown at the rue Champlain. In the foreground sprawls a formless mess of shacks and mud. A boy sits alone on a hill, staring into the distance, where Haussmann's pristine Paris rises, white and remote, like an apparition.

'Charles Marville' opens at National Gallery of Art Exhibition reveals new biographical information, and places best-known work in context of varied career.

His life, set against the dramatic background of the first half of the 19th century in Paris, is the subject of a delightful exhibition (until Feb. 15) at the Historical Library of the City of Paris. Manuscripts, drawings and paintings are juxtaposed with daguerreotypes and photographs - Atget, Carjat, Nadar, but especially Charles Marville's views of the streets where Baudelaire lived (he moved a lot, and a large map of Paris shows more than 40 residences). Baudelaire had a brief moment of revolutionary fervor in 1848, and here are dramatic daguerreotypes of the barricades that brought down Louis-Philippe. \"Paris change!\" Baudelaire wrote in \"Le Cygne,\" and here are Marville's stark pictures of large parts of the city being destroyed to make way for Baron Haussmann's idea of the city beautiful. Baudelaire was born in 1821, the son of Francois Baudelaire, then 62, once a priest and more recently a civil servant who was, his son said, a dreadful painter (paintings in the exhibition bear out Baudelaire's opinion). When the elder Baudelaire died in 1827, his widow, Caroline Dufays, quickly remarried a soldier, Jacques Aupick, a blow to the boy (who probably was not aware that she was pregnant; the child was stillborn a month after the wedding). His was a quintessentially Parisian life, and Marville's pictures are there to remind the visitor both of the beauty of Paris, and of its sinister side, street stalls, peeling facades, unquiet shadows, the Paris of the streetwalker and the hungry man. Baudelaire breathed that Paris, he saw the beauty in its ugliness, but he also saw the ugliness, the loneliness, the terrible sound of a carriage rattling over wet cobblestones before dawn. He was frequently desperate, disgusted by his life, the constant money worries, all the mornings after (\"Laudanum and wine are bad resources against sadness. They pass the time, but they don't remake life,\" he wrote to his mother in 1847). He was the poet of morbidity and decay, of love as torture or surgery.

Haussmann's program of urban renewal, as we would now call it, was the pursuit of politics by other means. More specifically, it gave him an eye for composition within a relatively limited, rectangular field -- the wood blocks he drew on not differing much in size from what he'd see in a view finder.

Outside Paris, there's a museum dedicated to a banker and philanthropist named Albert Kahn, who, not long after the turn of the last century, realized the world was changing irrevocably, and that many societies and places faced extinction. [...]he lost a bundle during the Depression, Kahn dispatched photographers with color film, something new at the time, to the four corners of the globe to compile what he came to call his Archives of the Planet, a celebration of life in all its variety and, in retrospect, an anthology of loss.