I recently learned about an amateur photography contest called ‘C’était Paris en 1970’ (‘This Was Paris in 1970’), whose roughly fourteen thousand participants produced seventy thousand black-and-white prints and thirty thousand color slides of the capital in the midst of enormous changes.

“The city of Paris … organized in the spring of 1970 an amateur photography competition aiming to produce exhaustive photographic coverage of [the city], divided into a grid of 1755 squares.” Click the map of Paris and at the top of each page click a link corresponding to a numbered square / carré on the map. The link will also show how many contest participants / candidats captured how many photographs / photographies for the square. As Catherine E. Clark explained in “‘C’était Paris en 1970’: Amateur Photography, Urbanism and Photographic History,” “the contest supplied a very uneven portrait of Paris in May of 1970.” But this newer website provides an interface for quickly browsing 30225 photographs from the event.