PARIS. Portrait of a City

L'air de Paris
The vivid history of the capital of love and photography

A city built on two millennia of history, Paris is entering the third century of its love story with photography. It was on the banks of the Seine that Niépce and Daguerre officially gave birth to this new art that has flourished ever since, developing a distinctive language and becoming a vital tool of knowledge.

Paris, Portrait of a City leads us through what Goethe described as a “universal city where every step upon a bridge or a square recalls a great past, where a fragment of history is unrolled at the corner of every street”. The history of Paris is recounted in photographs ranging from Daguerre’s early incunabula to the most recent images – an almost complete record of over a century and a half of transformations and a vast panorama spanning more than 600 pages and 500 photographs. This book brings together the past and the present, the monumental and the everyday, objects and people. Images captured by the most illustrious photographers – Daguerre, Marville, Atget, Lartigue, Brassai, Kertész, Ronis, Doisneau, Cartier-Bresson and many more – but also by many unknown photographers, attempt to bottle just a little of that “Parisian air”, something of that particular poetry given out by the stones and inhabitants of a constantly changing city that has inspired untold numbers of writers and artists over the ages.

Presenting an exciting patchwork of images from past and present, Paris, Portrait of a City is a huge and unique photographic study that, in a way, is the true family album of all Parisians. It is to them, and to all lovers of this capital city, that this vibrant, loving and tender testimony is dedicated.

"Dans les pas de Paris. Ils magnifient la ville depuis pres de deux siecles. Un livre réunit (enfin !) les ouvres des plus grands photographes. Une histoire capitale. Attention: ce livre sur Paris est un inépuisable monument. Riche de plus de 600 Pages avec autant de photos, il se lit d’une traite et se relit encore, tant ses détails sont instructifs: citations avisées, légendes pointues, biographies de photographes disparus…Tant et tant de pages étonnantes, splendides ou tragiques, dont l’écho a cessé d’etre audible dans ce gros bourg endormi qui fut, avant New York, la capitale du monde, ayant cannibalisé les talents de province et d’ailleurs. On est pris de vertige en découvrant les Paris qui se sont succédé- maisons médiévales autour de Notre-Dame, murs peints, fortifications, moulins de Montmartre…et l’auteur, ami de Willy Ronis, qui se fit connaître par ses reportages sur la destruction des halles, étouffe mal sa nostalgie en rappelant ce mot de Baudelaire: ŤLa photographie est la pour sauver des choses qui vont disparaîtreť." L’Express Styles, Paris, France