Paris's Urban Imaginary: The City Exhibited (1873-1880)

The French Government’s donation to the State Library of Victoria in 1881 of items displayed in its pavilion for the Melbourne International Exhibition is best known for its unique collection of albums by the Parisian photographer Charles Marville. Recording Paris before, during and after the ‘creative destruction’ of Haussmannisation, the albums present a highly orchestrated vision of the city, commissioned by the Ville de Paris and expertly executed by Marville. From Marville’s photographs and their organization into albums we can discern the Ville’s desired representation of the city: a unified ‘networked’ city under the post-1860 new administrative structure, with equal emphasis on new buildings and public space as well as oscillation between technical and urban amenity. However, despite their significance, Marville’s album only are only two of the twenty-six that remain in Melbourne.

This presentation turns its attention to a number of the other items in this collection to understand the vision of late nineteenth century Paris that they might represent. My research has traced the previous use of much of this material to the Vienna World’s Fair (1873), followed by the Exposition Universelle Paris (1878), possibly Sydney in 18xx and finally the Melbourne International Exhibition in 1880. If we apply the same consideration of Marville’s photographic albums to the other drawn, photographed and modelled imagery from the Ville de Paris we can discern another ‘imaginary’ of Paris constructed by the reorganization and presentation of the same material between exhibitions.
Utilising documentary images of the exhibits by Löwy (Vienna), Pougin and Marville (Paris) as well as the material in Melbourne, the presentation uses the example of the infrastructure project of the Dérivation de Vanne, the construction of the Montsouris Reservoir and the Atlases of Paris to constructs a visual narrative of Paris’s relationship with the countryside as well the Ville’s documentation of the hydraulic refurbishment of the city.
Through engineering drawings, maps and photographic albums by Hippolyte Collard (as well as administrate atlases, large-scale models and 1:1 prototypes) the presentations calls to attention not just the content of the material but the manner of its organization, reorganization and exhibition. This highlights different modes of exhibitionary display; the ‘sequential’, the ‘serial’ and the ‘panoramic’ as modes of viewing information and constructing understanding of the spatial consequences of the new infrastructure, and architecture of the city and the hinterland on which it depended.