Place de la Concorde fills the frame of this albumen silver print stereoview, part of Hippolyte Jouvin's celebrated "Paris Instantané" series produced in Paris around 1865. Jouvin published a series of over two hundred stereoscopic photographs titled "Vues instantanées de Paris" beginning in 1863. The term "instant" refers to the fast exposure time that allowed for the capture of people in motion on the streets, where earlier large-format cameras with long exposures would have rendered the same scenes empty. The result here is a view alive with movement, making it a rare and compelling document of mid-Second Empire Paris.

The square is photographed from an elevated vantage point, with a wrought-iron fence anchoring the foreground. Horse-drawn wagons and carriages cross the paved expanse, several figures caught mid-stride, their motion slightly blurred by the instantaneous exposure. The Luxor Obelisk rises at center, flanked by the neoclassical façades of the Hôtel de la Marine and the Hôtel de Crillon stretching across the background, their colonnaded galleries rendered in sharp architectural detail. Women in full dark skirts and men in top hats populate the middle ground, lending the image immediate human scale.

Art historians have argued that Jouvin's "Vues instantanées de Paris" may have been a source of inspiration to the Impressionists, with art historian Aaron Scharf comparing the elevated viewpoints in some paintings of Gustave Caillebotte to the elevated viewpoints of Jouvin's photographs. Scharf also compared the cropping style in Edgar Degas's painting "Place de la Concorde" to this same photographic series, noting that many of Jouvin's photographs feature human figures and horse-drawn carriages partially cropped out of frame in a manner similar to Degas's compositions.

The reverse bears a printed yellow label reading: "PARIS INSTANTANÉ. / PLACE DE LA CONCORDE." (Paris Instantaneous. / Place de la Concorde.) A manuscript notation in pencil at lower left reads "1865," and the number "No 12" is inscribed in red ink on the face of the mount at left.