PhotoBooks France-Paris

Celebrating beloved cities from around the world, this book on the City of Lights offers a unique combination of historic interest and contemporary beauty. Then and Now Paris features over 100 fascinating archival photographs contrasted with specially commissioned, full-color images of the same scene today. Each work is a visual lesson in the historic changes of this amazingly beautiful and wonderful urban landscape.

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"Photography is nothing, it's life that interests me." With his ever-present Leica camera, Henri Cartier-Bresson captured the raw and the sweet, the comic and the profound moments of lives that were lost in the grind or relegated to someone else's memory--the coincidental moment at which a reflection in a puddle of water mimics a poster on a nearby wall or when lovers kiss, oblivious to the not-so-pristine world around them. It is the familiar beauty and cruelty of the day-to-day that is so engaging in his photographs: two cosmopolitan woman chat nonchalantly while surrounded by empty lettuce crates; mourners at a funeral stare directly into the camera; postwar Paris awakens in the fog. Cartier-Bresson was the master of the "decisive moment," that fleeting instant for which a picture really is worth a thousand words, which is the essence of photojournalism. In no place is this more exemplified than in his images of Paris.

Cartier-Bresson personally selected the more than 130 black-and-white photographs of Paris for this publication. With photographs taken over a period of 50 years, the work is beautifully and generously printed in duotone. The accompanying essays, both short and unobtrusive, are also familiar and personal. One essayist captures the essence of Cartier-Bresson's camera work: "When life calls, he is always there, to assist, or to admire; to rebel, or to say no to exploiters and imposters, and to all those who demean its value." --Manine Golden

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There's a magnificent colored glass skylight pictured on a double spread in this book that was photographed not in a cathedral but a department store. On the very next page is the highly distinctive tower of a steam laundry. Such is Weinreb's uncanny eye -- and lens -- for the details that escape most people. The boulevards, bridges, palaces and archways that Parisians prize are here, but so are the weird and wonderful things they often take for granted about their great city, like the skull with bat's wings that sits on the corner of a tomb in the Pere-Lachaise cemetery. Weinreb has special fondness for the many gargoyles that decorate the keystones of arches.

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Over 200 never-before-published photographs from one of the twentieth century's most innovative photographers.

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William Klein always dreamed of living in Paris, like Henry Miller, Gertrude Stein, and other like-minded artists and writers. In 1948, stationed by the United States Army in Paris, he stayed--and fled his family and America to become a painter. He quickly found another family and recognition for his talent. Today, one is tempted, like critic Anthony Lane, to say that he is "the American in Paris." PARIS + KLEIN gathers together hundreds of photographs shot by Klein from the time he first picked up a camera in the 1960s until he put it down, momentarily, to put together this book. In his signature color and black-and-white compositions, jostled to the brim with more information than a single camera lens was ever expected to take in, we find: men in the street, celebrities, demonstrations, fashion, the police, politics, races, the métro, soccer, death. . .The whole life of a capital seen through the lively, acidic, melancholic, humorous, ironical, and moving eyes of William Klein.

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Kiki's Paris: Artists and Lovers 1900-1930 presents a delightful evocation of the life of Alice Prin, or Kiki, and her generation in Paris--from her favorite cafés and the cramped artists' studios where she modeled to her relationships with so many of the great artists of the period. The historical and personal details culled from books, memoirs, and letters alone would constitute a fabulous biography; with the photographs--more than 650--the book is transformed into a work of art in its own right. Publisher's Weekly raves, "Kiki ... was outrageous, charming, beautiful, talented--and so is the Paris that emerges. We see ... Matisse, Modigliani, Picasso, Man Ray, Stein, Léger, Cocteau, Brancusi, Soutine and hundreds of others...." Kiki's Paris is a paean to the heady blossoming of an era and the height of the artists' community in Montparnasse, vividly woven from the fragile strands of time. It is impossible to walk away from this book unaffected: even Paris-phobes will swoon under the influence of such intoxicating nostalgia. --Jhana Bach

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The works of French photographer Eugène Atget (1857-1927) can be considered as prototypes for some of the great aesthetic movements (cubism, surrealism, conceptualism) that continue to influence modern and contemporary art. His detailed visual record of Paris and its environs were sold to painters to use as source material, and later to institutions dedicated to the preservation of the city's past. The Bibliothèque des Arts Décoratifs in Paris acquired nearly 1800 poetic images of decorative details such as boiseries, door knockers, staircase balustrades, garden ornaments, and magnificent plaster work from Atget's studio.

The selection of more than 300 works exquisitely reproduced in this volume were chosen not only for their documentary record of the decorative splendors of Paris, but also for their concentration on the subtleties of form and their stunning aesthetic power. Atget's continued use of a large format view camera and glass plate negatives, allowed for bigger negatives that resulted in fine details and richly toned images. His encyclopedic purpose and the simplicity of his method are so timeless that his work still fascinates today. The poetic impassivity of the images, the detailed beauty of their subjects, and the simple juxtaposition of their proportions will be an inspiration to all those interested in design and the decorative arts as well as those interested in the history of photography.

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Alone, or in the company of friends, Brassaï discovered and recorded the forbidden Paris of the 1930s, its brothels, whores, pimps, opium dens, and transvestite cafés—the sordid yet fascinating bas-monde where high society mingled with the underworld. The Secret Paris of the '30s is one of the most remarkable photographic memoirs ever published: like his predecessor Toulouse-Lautrec, Brassaï chose to portray a hidden and daring subject matter. His photographs reveal a milieu previously known only through books such as the novels of Henry Miller (a frequent companion of Brassaï's nocturnal rambles), the seamy, grimy, yet infinitely exciting reality that tourists still think of when they seek "Paris by night." These unique pictures are accompanied by an immensely interesting text in which Brassaï reminisces and describes the extraordinary conditions under which he took his photographs. 150 b/w photographs.

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Hidden behind the elegant façades and high walls of Paris are its private gardens. Whether grandiose or minuscule, highly manicured or exuberantly untended, these gardens are a secret treasure seldom seen by the visitor to Paris. This book reveals some fifty gardens, all created with passion by their owners, often in collaboration with well-known landscape designers. Each proprietor discusses the conditions in which the garden was created, the constraints and the problems that were encountered, and explains why the final design and plantings were chosen. The traditional French-style gardens, such as those of Hubert de Givenchy or Pierre Bergé, are attached to private town houses, and their designs mirror the elegance and restraint of these classic dwellings. Romantic, picturesque potagers or kitchen gardens belonging to Yves Saint Laurent and others reflect their owners' taste for outdoor living. Tropical gardens with giant ferns and rare flowers, admirably tended oriental gardens, a Russian garden surrounding a little wooden hut, a Japanese garden that encourages meditation—these exotic hideaways allow us to discover other cultures. Beautifully photographed and described, this sumptuous volume invites the reader to explore these secluded horticultural gems within the heart of Paris, the most magical of cities. 220 color photographs.

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