Figures are relatively rare in Marville's street photographs because inhabitants of the city seldom stood still long enough during an exposure (roughly three to fifteen seconds) to register on a negative. On occasion Marville deliberately posed one of his assistants in the otherwise lonely stretches of abandoned structures, recalling the theme of the romantic wanderer contemplating the remnants of earlier civilizations but also the modern notion of the flâneur, the disengaged observer of the rapidly transforming city.
