From 1839 something of a love affair developed between Paris and photography, a romance that grew more passionate as it lasted down the decades. Today the story of that amour allows us to trace a double history: that of a wonderful city and that of a new art which excels in capturing, in Goethe’s words, “a universal city, where every step taken on a bridge or square brings to mind a great past, and where history has been played out on every street corner.” It is an art that bears witness not just to the changing face of that city, but to a changing aesthetic, to an evolution in the way things are seen, in thinking, in photographers’ predilections, and in the way they view the tool of their trade, at once an industrial product and a means of artistic expression. Since the first works of Daguerre, Paris has remained an inexhaustible source of inspiration for all the photographers, those “poets of light.”

Jean-Claude Gautrand