A new map of Paris’s iconic Brutalist buildings charts the city’s uneasy relationship with the style.
The idea of photographically cataloguing Paris in 1970 should come as no great surprise, for it had historical precedents. Since the nineteenth century, the destruction of Paris has gone hand in hand with its preservation in images. Georges-Eugène Haussmann, whose name has become synonymous with Paris’s rational urbanization, should also be remembered for his work to establish a visual archive of the city’s history and a public museum in which to display it: the musée Carnavalet. He saw this as a necessary complement to the major upheaval of urban renovation. The systematic visual documentation of the city before, during, and after its transformations that he commissioned from Charles Marville and the too-often-overlooked watercolorist Fedor Hoffbauer would help the public and historical experts alike remember and study the city’s past and present. Starting in the last decades of the nineteenth century, new groups and institutions including the Commission municipale du Vieux Paris (dedicated to studying and preserving the traces of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries), the musée Carnavalet, and the Bibliothèque historique ensured the continuation of this process of preserving the city in images. They commissioned photographic documentation of buildings and streets that were slated for destruction and purchased photos that presented important evidence of the city’s history. From 1903 to 1907 the Commission municipale du Vieux Paris even sponsored a series of amateur photo contests designed to produce urban documentation at low cost. Much as Haussmannization had incited these first efforts to photograph Paris systematically, the city’s transformations in the 1960s and 1970s inspired Claude Gourbeyre, then mayor of the 20th arrondissement, to propose the largest single attempt to catalogue Paris photographically. By participating in the contest’s organization, Paris’s largely conservative municipal council, like Haussmann, admitted that contemporary urbanization meant the destruction of historic neighborhoods. Although the product of cooperation between numerous groups and individuals on both sides of the political spectrum, the contest must have been conceived, at least in part, as an effort to convince Parisians of city officials’ attention to the importance of historic preservation – if only in pictorial form. This article describes the contest that Gourbeyre’s suggestion inspired. It argues that ‘C’était Paris en 1970’ adapted the rich visual tradition of Parisian transformation for an era of mass photography. The contest’s organizers embraced the idea championed throughout the century that everyone could be a photographer; by extension, as its advertisements bragged, photography could ‘transform all Parisians into reporters, into archivists, into explorers of the Parisian sublime or commonplace. Promotional materials promised that ‘even very simple cameras’ (and even in the hands of amateurs) could produce valuable, archival quality images. Presumably the contest also turned thousands into avid consumers of the cameras, film, and developing services available at the Fnac. Nonetheless, during a period in which professional photographs sold by private press agencies cost dear, how better to document a whole city than by taking advantage of camera-clad volunteers? Amateurs as an obvious solution to the problem of creating photographic documentation would become unthinkable in the years to come as photography was absorbed into official institutions and discourses of high art and culture in France. Although multiple similar amateur photo contests intended to document a place or time, from the Fnac’s ‘C’était Toulouse en 1986’ to The New York Times’ 2010 ‘A Moment in Time,’ have taken place since, and amateur photographers and their social networking sites continue to create incidental records of global events, ‘C’était Paris en 1970’ marks the last time that a government body confided the creation of officially sanctioned documentation on this scale to amateurs. The resulting photographs show that the conference’s organizers had every reason to expect that amateur photographers could produce a vibrant record of modern life in a period of rapid urban change.
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