Boulevard des Italiens, Paris

While William Henry Fox Talbot’s The Boulevards of Paris offers a removed, all-knowing bird’s-eye view of Paris, this image made during the same visit presents a very different perspective that immerses the viewer in the scene. Talbot stationed himself nearly at street level in order to take this photograph. Placing his camera in a slightly elevated position, perhaps in a hotel or shop room a floor or so above the avenue, he projects himself, and us, directly into the scene. The lamp in the foreground defines a three-dimensional space and perhaps helps to explain the unusual framing of the image. Instead of capturing all the façade of the edifice across the street, Talbot provides a look up an alley, giving substantial depth to the picture, all the way from the lamp in the forefront to the next rank of structures in the rear. He employed a similar technique in some of his photographs of Oxford, adding perspective to a scene even while hemmed in by buildings.

What could have been a routine recording of a city’s architecture is here expressed as a city’s life. Some people must be hidden behind the shutters; others are turned into ghosts by their own bustle. The nervous movement of the horses lends an air of tension and change. Like the carriage driver, we wait to see what will happen next.

Beyond its rendering of life in Paris, this particular plate reveals Talbot’s working procedures as well, emphasizing the fact that each print was made by hand on a sheet of specially coated paper. The brushing of the precious silver salts out to near the edges adds a watercolor-like individuality to this artifact.

Adapted from Larry Schaaf, William Henry Fox Talbot, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2002), 74. ©2002 J. Paul Getty Trust.