Our approach to making this collection was to find a subset of the available photos that told a compelling story. The hardest part of this project was deciding on what our focus would be. We eventually settled on displaying pictures of people in the neighborhood over the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries with a focus on class.

We wanted to explore how the social class distribution of Marais changed over time and how members of class were displayed. We hope with this approach that a narrative will emerge as the pictures of members of the lower, upper, and bourgeois class are viewed with the progression of the centuries in mind. The original collection had a great deal of engravings and portraits depicting people in France and the Marais area of various classes and over many years, so we have good coverage over all the people we wanted to display.

Our exhibition can be found here.