Photographies de la Commission du Vieux Paris (Photographs of the Commission of Old Paris)

Reviewed by: Alex Lee

Review date: March 31, 2025

Site Link: https://fnp.huma-num.fr/adws/app/515ec27b-90ce-11ec-a660-af5a22dfde2b/

Archive Link: https://archive.ph/rfnjI

Keywords: Cultural Heritage, Spatial and Spatio-temporal Analysis

Data Sources:

• Photographs taken by Charles Lansiaux and Édouard Desprez between 1916 and the early 1930s as part of the “Casier artistique et archéologique” initiative
  
• Photographs taken by Charles Lansiaux between 1919 and 1920 of the Thiers fortifications
  
• Photographs taken by various photographers in the 1960s and 1970s as part of pre-demolition surveys

Processes:

• The photographs in question had been catalogued and digitized several decades prior to this project’s launch
  
• The digital project creators reviewed and cleaned up the existing inventory of photographs and then georeferenced them (i.e., added geographic data that could place the photographs at a particular address)
  
• Each of the three groups of digitized photographs was then organized as a layer within the mapping interface

Presentation:

The project is a web-based interactive map that depicts Paris, overlaid with thousands of red dots. The map takes up the vast majority of the window, although there are panels along the left, upper, and right sides of the window that respectively: describe the project; offer a search bar where users can input any address; allow a user to select from various layers to reveal or hide aspects of the map.
Within the map itself, hovering over a red dot pulls up an address marker, while clicking a dot opens up a side panel that includes scanned photographs associated with that location. Each photograph can be expanded by selecting a small “file” icon, which calls the high-resolution version of the image from the API (alongside meta-data such as inventory number).

Digital Tools Used:

• Waze and Google Maps for mapping layers
  
• Nakala API to return individual photographs
  
• IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) to ensure accurate and high-quality image attribution
  
• AngularJS

Languages:

• French

Review

Photographies de la Commission du Vieux Paris traces its origins to the Commission du Vieux Paris (Commission of Old Paris, or CVP), a municipal initiative formed in the late 1890s to “assurer le souvenir des parties de la ville appelées forcément à disparaître, ou présentant un aspect pittoresque” (“ensure the memory of parts of the city that are inevitably destined to disappear or which are picturesque”).

Comprising over 10,000 images spanning several decades in the 20th century, the three groups of photographs (those taken as part of the “Casier artistique et archéologique” initiative; those documenting the Thiers fortifications; and those from pre-demolition surveys in the 1960s-70s) came about through the commission in an effort to preserve the memory of buildings, spaces, and other physical landmarks that were headed for destruction.

The CVP held onto the photographs for decades, including cataloguing them and eventually digitizing them once the technology supported it.

The digital project builds on this archival work by organizing it into the highly interactive and accessible medium of a map. The project was spearheaded by the Department of Architectural History and Archaeology of the City of Paris (DHAAP) and the Paris Time Machine, a consortium within the CNRS, a state-run scientific research organization.

The photographs are made available to the public through a CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication license, meaning others can freely use them. They are intended primarily for research use, as well as for general interest from the public (including Parisians who want to see what their building or street looked like back in the day).

The map interface is the first thing a user will see, and there is little guidance around how to use it. The search bar includes an input placeholder that suggests searching for an image or an address, although it’s unlikely users would already have specific image meta-data in mind. More likely, they will enter an address, which triggers the map to place a marker at that exact address, which may not actually have a photo attached to it. But from there you can move around the map to try to find nearby photos.

I found it more interesting and exciting to simply click red dots at random and see what came up. It’s easy to get lost in exploring the site this way — a positive sign for provoking a sense of adventure and wonder among visitors to the site who come without a specific address in mind. However, it would be helpful to have some signposts or guides amid the sea of images — perhaps in the form of essays that connect select images into a narrative; or tags on images that create a thematic taxonomy or thesaurus. Otherwise, it’s difficult to connect any one image to another.

The one element of organization, which I at first missed completely, is the map’s layering capabilities. In an inconspicuous menu at the top right, users can select from various icons, one of which indicates layers in the map. Removing layers allows users to understand how the different photographic data sources make up the overall map. The most thematically cohesive grouping is the set of photographs of the Thiers fortifications, walls that ran around the entire perimeter of Paris from the mid-19th century that were to be demolished in the 1920s.

Otherwise, though, the archive of images can feel a bit haphazard and overwhelming. The lack of clear labeling does not help — for instance, one of the layers reads “Analyse CVP_POINTS_IMAGES,” which doesn’t tell me much about the data source and reads more like a placeholder file name.

I also at first felt the images — which, when called up, are relatively small and are not clickable — were too hard to access or view given they are the real substance here. But as I dug deeper, I realized that this was a feature, not a bug. By using this somewhat circuitous API-based approach, the project preserves the extremely high quality of the images while keeping site load times down to a minimum. I imagine that using larger versions of the images as the baseline would overwhelm the site’s operations.

Instead, we’re given the gift of truly gorgeous photographs that are rich in detail and color. The prioritization of image quality over accessibility plays to the site’s strength of encouraging curiosity and exploration, and in the end I didn’t mind working through the somewhat clunky interface if it meant getting to see the photographs in this form.

Ultimately, I feel this tool works very well as an exploratory aesthetic medium. However, I’m not sure it accomplishes, on its own, what the CVP set out to do back in the 19th century — that is, to ensure the memory of what will be physically lost or demolished. I believe more curatorial work (exhibitions, narrative documents accompanying the tool, walking tours, etc.) would better support memory formation by telling a more coherent (albeit less comprehensive) story that builds on this digital tool.

How are the collaborative aspects reflected in the project and are there elements that work particularly well?

This is a relatively top-down project, in that it was conducted by municipal or state-run organizations that made use of their own archives, which had come about through internal mnemonic initiatives. However, it reflects the CVP’s long-running process of documenting Paris through the eyes of photographers and, now, digital historians and humanists.

Do you see an opportunity for collaboration that would be helpful to the project?

I could foresee a counterpart to this project that instead crowdsources photographs from Paris’ residents of the 20th century or which compares it to photographs of contemporary Paris. Doing so would bring the CVP’s efforts into conversation with the residents of the city itself.