Rue Zacharie (Rue Xavier-Privas)

Marville is said to have reached ”documentary perfection” with his photographs of Paris in the late 1850s and 60s. At the government's invitation, he documented the old quarters of the French capital, recording the buildings and neighborhoods destroyed by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s urban planning projects. Haussmann enlarged boulevards and open spaces in Paris. Marville purposely photographed Paris’s architecture and streets when it was raining, so that the soft diffused light and wet cobblestones produced romantic, dreamy images with crisp details. Named official photographer of Paris in 1862, Marville served both as the photographer to the Imperial Museum of the Louvre and to King Vittorio Emmanuelle of Italy.