Paris - Portrait of a city Book

Built on two millennia of history, Paris is as much a city to fall in love with as it is a city to photograph. This visual companion to the French metropolis captures the city's chic spirit through hundreds of meticulously researched images, from some of the first photographs ever taken of Paris - by Louis Daguerre and Henry Fox Talbot - to iconic images of its fashion, art, and architecture. Paris: Portrait of a City takes us through what Goethe described as a “universal city where every step over a bridge or a square is reminiscent of a great past, where a fragment of history unfolds around the corner of every street”. The story of Paris is told in photographs ranging from Daguerre's earliest incunabula to the most recent images - an almost complete record of over a century and a half of transformations and a vast panorama spanning over 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 distinguished photographers - Daguerre, Marville, Atget, Lartigue, Brassaï, Kertész, Ronis, Doisneau, Cartier-Bresson and many others - but also by many unknown photographers, try to bottle a little of that “Parisian air”, something of that poetry given by the stones and inhabitants of an ever-changing city that has inspired countless writers and artists throughout the ages. The editor and author: Jean Claude Gautrand (1932-2019) was one of France's most distinguished specialists in photography. An active photographer since the 1960s, he has also distinguished himself as a historian, journalist and critic, with numerous publications including his TASCHEN books on Brassaï (2004), Paris. Portrait of a City (2011), Robert Doisneau (2014) and Eugène Atget. Paris (2016).