Dominique Girard, ambassador of France in India (left), and guest of honour Daniel Pennac at the CIMA exhibition of photographs. Picture by Amit Datta

The march of time grinds to a halt as one tries to take in the essence of the overwhelming exhibition, Objectif Paris, curated by Anne Cartier-Bresson, niece of the great master, that opened at CIMA Gallery on Thursday evening.

Time stops in its tracks as we see Paris from the 1900s, when aesthetic concerns started to outweigh the technical problems that photographers of that era faced. Instants are frozen, as giant plumes of light created by fireworks explode before the Eiffel Tower and the Place de la Concorde turns into a gleaming necklace in early 1900 in the works of Gabriet Loppe and Pierre Jahan. Was Henri Cartier-Bresson waiting for the decisive moment to unfold as he snapped the man jumping over a puddle, his slightly-blurred reflection a couple of inches under his feet?

Mimmo Jodice turns Paris into a futuristic city of sheer looking-glass walls, with cars whizzing past and avant garde architecture. In these views up to 2000, dreams become inseparable from reality.

What makes this exhibition of invaluable archival material, mostly in classic black-and-white, so fascinating is that the curator has juxtaposed images of similar situations taken at various points of time, and created contrasts of angles, textures, moods and points of view.

Edouard Boubat?s sunbathers in demure two-pieces in 1960, become bare-breasted when William Klein shot them in colour nearly 30 years later. It reflects a change in attitudes and social norms.

Paris remains in essence a medieval city, as it is photographed from the vertiginous heights of the Notre-Dame. Gargoyles in the foreground stare menacingly at the blaze of lights beneath, in Brassai (1933) and Michel Semeniako (1994).

Some photographers did not wait for the decisive moment ? they created it themselves. Caesar stands upright, a solitary figure, with a crowd of human beings melting into the background. Jean-Luc Moulene creates another image in colour of a window with a view, the flashlight etching out the edges the glass panes. Only photography and no other medium could have created such a work.

Many of these photographs turn the city into still life without a soul stirring anywhere. The details of architecture, light, graphiti, posters and street surfaces turns Paris into a montage quite as remarkable as the one of landmarks created in 1930 by Jean Auvigne. There are many similar experiments with separate images from early 20th Century to 2000. It is difficult to take in so huge and so varied a display of images at one go. Several visits are recommended.