Photographing Greater Paris: A Visual History of Metropolitan Change.
Raphaële Bertho, Sonia Keravel, Frédéric Pousin, Nathalie Roseau
Editions Hermann, 2024, 330 p.
If capturing the big city is no easy task, putting it into images is even more difficult. How can we capture the dynamics of time as it shapes space? How can we grasp something that is in motion, multifaceted, and immense? This book posits that we cannot understand the history of Greater Paris—social, architectural, urban, landscape, political—and its development without understanding the images that this history has produced and the various purposes for which they were created, interpreted, publicized, and preserved. At the crossroads of several segments of the history of the big city, the 13 studies that make up this book contribute to writing a history of photography of metropolitan change while questioning the representability of a metropolis in perpetual evolution.