Contenu du sommaire : Photographier la ville

Paris holds a notable place in the collection of autochromes and films in the Archives of the Planet, an iconographic collection built up by banker Albert Kahn in the early twentieth century. This paper presents the historical value of this collection, as well as its main specific features and topography. The complementarity between the two image-capturing processes is examined in the context of the Paris region, as the properties of each technique contributed to the documentary objective of Kahn's project. This collection conveys the urban issues of the era, such as the attention paid to the aesthetics of the landscape and to improving traffic. A few of the major urban development projects and transformations of the Paris outskirts are narrated in images over a period of several years.

Paris was, along with London, the most photographed city of the nineteenth century. Photographic plates, and later photographic film, captured hundreds of thousands of scenes of Parisian life. Unfortunately, these images are a poor documentary source for historians of the city. This is because the images ordered by city administrations and urban reformers, as well as those taken by tourists and amateur photographers, carried on existing iconographic traditions. It is also because these images were not attempting to capture the present, and in some cases were careful to elude it: whereas some photographers collected the traces of the past, others were seeking to forecast the city of the future. All in all, everyday life and the contemporary world appeared in these photographs only by accident or on the margins, while always escaping a collective view.

This paper addresses the link between photography and urban transformations in the nineteenth century through two major themes: photography as testimony of major urban construction projects (demolitions, building projects, constructions, creating new roadways or widening existing ones), and photography as a tool for preserving the memory of housing or neighbourhoods that are slated to disappear. The first part of this paper looks at a few examples of major construction projects from the second half of the century (in Bordeaux, Lille, Lyon and Marseille): the context behind the commission of photographic work, the photographer, the photo-taking, the subjects of photographs, the worksites themselves (including equipment and labourers), the construction of new facilities, and the completed developments. In the second part, we focus on the reverse side of these transformations, namely the preservation in images of neighbourhoods slated for partial or total destruction because of these major development projects. We will show how local authorities (sometimes at the behest of historical societies) were concerned about preserving the memory, through images, of buildings threatened or sacrificed in major urban building projects. In addition to the examples of Bordeaux, Lille and Marseille, we will also look at projects in Limoges and Le Mans.

Just after photography was invented in 1839, Orientalist scholars realised the immense potential of this medium and began to use it. Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey, a historian of architecture trained in photographic technique, travelled to the Orient in 1843. He visited Damascus, and the daguerreotypes that he brought back are the earliest photographs of the city to survive. Six of these daguerreotypes are held in the National Library of France. These images teach us not only about Girault de Prangey's areas of interest and a photographer's working conditions in the Orient in the early days of photography. They also provide us with information about the urban landscape and the socio-political context of Damascus, at the dawn of the period of upheavals that accompanied the Tanzimât.

Two decades after the birth of Roman photography, British archaeologist John Henry Parker (1806-1884) commissioned Roman photographers to undertake what would become the first major photographic report covering an urbanised area in its totality. Comprising more than 4,000 images made between 1855 and 1885, the copy of the Parker Collection held by the INHA's Library is the starting point for thinking about the use of archaeological or architectural photography in a perspective that combines urban history and the history of photography. Based on an analysis of a selection of views, as well as a comparison with other photographs of the same period, the aim is to show the potential of this investigation of the city's past for knowledge about its contemporary reality during the second half of the nineteenth century, without ignoring the methodological shortfalls of such an approach.

While recent historiography has highlighted a Europe-wide process of professionalization for urban police forces in the eighteenth century, the police of Marseille was surprisingly stable over this period. In 1789, despite many reform projects aimed at introducing a professional watch, night-time surveillance still relied on the garde bourgeoise (bourgeois guard), a legacy of the Middle Ages. However, this absence of change was merely superficial. While no reform transformed the guard entirely, more piecemeal changes enabled the municipality to meet the new challenges of an evolving city. A highly empirical specific police system was built gradually based on local needs, reflecting the multiple dimensions of modern police forces, dependent on local situations.

This article explores the political discourse conveyed by Lisbon, the capital of the Portuguese territorial communities, in its institutional relationship with the Crown. An analysis of the specific grievances presented by Lisbon to the assemblies of the estates, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, allows us to identify and categorise the arguments put forth by the city.