You might almost think of Charles Marville, the 19th-century photographer, as akin to the guys who drive around mapping streets for Google. He was a hired hand, an illustrator turned photographer near the dawn of the medium. Paris officials enlisted him to document, among other things, new parks and squares but also the streets, shops and tenements scheduled for demolition — to make, in essence, a historical record of a city soon to be lost.

That was the Paris of Victor Hugo and “Les Misérables,” which Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, Napoleon III’s planning czar, was sweeping away to make room for the glittery, bourgeois metropolis that tourists love. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a great show of Marville’s photographs from back then, when luxury apartment buildings were replacing old shops and homes, and many working people could no longer afford to live in their own neighborhoods.

Marville was a man for our time.

His project was very French. Outside Paris, there’s a museum dedicated to a banker and philanthropist named Albert Kahn, who, not long after the turn of the last century, realized the world was changing irrevocably, and that many societies and places faced extinction. Until he lost a bundle during the Depression, Kahn dispatched photographers with color film, something new at the time, to the four corners of the globe to compile what he came to call his Archives of the Planet, a celebration of life in all its variety and, in retrospect, an anthology of loss.

Marville’s ambit wasn’t quite so grand; it was a single city, and he seems to have never publicly uttered a peep about its transformation.