Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [67]
A Town Like Paris: Falling in Love in the City of Light, Bryce Corbett (Broadway, 2007). When I first learned of this memoir, by a (then) twenty-eight-year-old Australian guy who’d been living and working in London before moving to Paris, I was inclined to dismiss it—I feared it would be little more than a Drinker’s Guide to the City of Light. I’m glad I read it, because even though there are plenty of references to bars and drinking I am, after all, a wine-loving writer, and Corbett is a lovable man with whom I share a (perhaps) over-the-top infatuation with Paris. I found myself smiling—if not laughing out loud—at many passages, especially in the hilarious “Get 27” chapter, which refers to, usually, a not very popular mint liqueur available in French bars. Corbett and some friends form a motley band by the same name, Get 27, spoken jet vingt-sept in French, “a name that rolled easily off the tongue,” and perform at a Marais bar called Le Connétable. Regardless of how many glasses of beer and wine you vicariously consume while reading the book, you find yourself completely agreeing with Corbett about the reasons he is in Paris in the first place, chief among them “because having a modest yet comfortable lifestyle is more important than acquiring and aspiring.”
Paris en Photo
Of the many, many books filled with photographs of Paris, here is a selection of titles whose pages I never tire of turning:
À Propos de Paris, Henri Cartier-Bresson and with texts by Vera Feyder and André Pieyre de Mandiargues (Bulfinch, 1994). More than 130 black-and-white photos by a photographer whose name is virtually synonymous with Paris.
Métropolitain: A Portrait of Paris, Matthew Weinreb and Fiona Biddulph (Phaidon, 1994). I like this photography book because none of the images are typical; Weinreb has focused on the smallest details, which, he says, “are so often missed by the hurried walker in the street.” The photo of the Institut du Monde Arabe is especially nice as the building is quite difficult for an amateur to capture on film, and the photo of Chagall’s ceiling in the Opéra is magnificent—if you somehow miss seeing the real thing, this is a good consolation prize.
Paris (Assouline, 2004). I am crazy for Assouline’s books, and this one, in its own slipcase, features good text with hundreds of photos.
Paris: 500 Photos, Maurice Subervie with a foreword by Bertrand Delanoë, (Flammarion, 2003). “How many people,” Paris mayor Delanoë asks in his foreword, “during an aimless stroll through our city, have felt the urge to seize a color, an instant, a piece of the azure sky, or a fragment of the night?” An awful lot, surely, but there’s no question that most of us cannot possibly capture that color, instant, or piece of sky as seductively as Subervie.
Paris: The City and Its Photographers, Patrick Deedes-Vincke (Bulfinch, 1992). A fascinating look at the history of photography and the role Paris played in its development, featuring the work of Lee Miller, Brassaï, Robert Capa, Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau, and others. There are no photographs after 1968 because, as the author states, “with the student riots of that year and the ensuing disruption, and with the urban upheaval of the mid-1960s, came the end of an era.”
Paris Vertical, Horst Hamann (teNeues, 2006). In order to photograph Paris vertically, Hamann notes, he had to rethink how he looked at things. “The visual challenge was not the search for the top, the vanishing points in the sky, but the inconspicuous, the details at eye level.” Hamann’s black-and-white photos are paired with great quotations in both French