Paris. Portrait of a City XL

Built on two millennia of history, Paris is a city to fall in love with and a city to photograph. This visual guide to the French metropolis captures the city's chic spirit through hundreds of meticulously researched images, from some of the earliest photographs of Paris taken by Louis Daguerre and Henry Fox Talbot to iconic images of fashion, art, and architecture.

The air of 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 affair with photography. It was on the banks of the Seine that Niépce and Daguerre officially gave birth to this new art, which has flourished ever since, developing a distinctive language and becoming an essential tool of knowledge.

Paris: Portrait of a City takes us through what Goethe described as a "universal city where every step across a bridge or a square recalls a great past, where a fragment of history unfolds at every street corner." The story of Paris is told in photographs ranging from Daguerre's earliest incunabula to his most recent images, a nearly 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 past and present, the monumental and the quotidian, objects and people. Images captured by the most illustrious photographers (Daguerre, Marville, Atget, Lartigue, Brassaï, Kertész, Ronis, Doisneau, Cartier-Bresson, and many others), as well as by many unknown photographers, attempt to capture a bit of that "Parisian air," something of the particular poetry emanating from the stones and inhabitants of an ever-changing city that has inspired countless writers and artists over the centuries.

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

The publisher and author
Jean Claude Gautrand (1932–2019) was one of France's most distinguished photography experts. A photographer active since 1960, he also made a name for 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).

Paris. Portrait of a City
Hardcover, 25 x 34 cm
544 pages
English language