Conventional pictures: Charles Marville in the Bois de Boulogne

This dissertation examines a group of sixty photographs made by the French photographer Charles Marville (1816-c. 1879), in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, in 1858, when it was transformed into the first and one of the grandest public parks of the nineteenth century. My aim is to use a single documentary project to frame my critical study of Marville's work, and to establish one model for looking at his broader documentary practice, which includes numerous series for the city of Paris, beginning with the Bois de Boulogne views. Taking up Roland Barthes' assertion that every photograph is dominated by its referents, and at the same time considering the contrary, biographical basis for many histories of nineteenth-century art, my chapters test the biographical mode of art historical writing---particularly writing about landscape as the expression of an artist's sensibility---over and against close attention to Marville's photographic subjects. I begin with an account of Marville's career rooted in archival research, and continue with an account of the Bois de Boulogne as a key project in the first phase of Haussmannization, one that resulted in a naturalistic landscape in modern Paris. I then shift to a reading of Marville's different arrangements of the Bois de Boulogne photographs in two surviving albums, and his use of existing landscape devices, drawn from various sources, when composing the views. Marville tested many landscape conventions in the Bois de Boulogne photographs, forecasting his later practice of fashioning pictorial compositions suited to given series and used repeatedly throughout them. Finally, I consider the Bois de Boulogne photographs against the field of nineteenth-century landscape imagery in France, from Barbizon painting to topographical prints to photographic illustrations, arguing that the Bois de Boulogne photographs are critical, thorough documents of a Haussmannian project, rather than Marville's response to a naturalistic landscape. While the dissertation offers a close reading of a particular group of photographs, its larger purpose is to establish a mode of looking at documentary photography rooted in art history, yet independent of existing art historical categories.