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Exhibition Information

William Henry Fox Talbot
British, 1800–1877
The Boulevards of Paris, 1843
salted paper print from paper negative
National Gallery of Art, Washington
New Century Fund

Upon his arrival in Paris in May 1843, the photographer William Henry Fox Talbot wrote to his mother that "I never saw Paris look so well and gay." In this photograph, Talbot's composition balances the elegance of the architecture with the blur of passing carriages and the intrusion of lampposts to demonstrate the camera's capacity to capture fleeting motion and to chronicle, as he wrote, "whatever it sees...with the same impartiality."

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