La Banlieue de Paris
“Doisneau’s best book, characteristically humane, captured the postwar suburbs of Paris just before they changed beyond recognition from spirited working-class neighborhoods to the urban wasteland that architects and planners created from the 1960s onwards.” -Parr/Badger, The Photobook, Vol I.
FIRST EDITION, the preferred Seghers issue with the famous dust jacket, SIGNED BY BOTH CENDRARS AND DOISNEAU and inscribed by Cendrars to the celebrated French artist Maurice Brianchon.
“Although the soft gray tones of the gravures here tend to give even the bleakest images a romantic cast, the grim austerity of the landscapes is strikingly modern. In a city still recovering from the war, Doisneau managed to find plenty of subjects for the sprightly social observation that would come to define his work.”
The iconic dust jacket “is a subtly disconcerting collage of three separate images. In the foreground, a wall of squat, featureless apartment blocks rises behind a continuous row of tiny figures standing on a ridge -- observers, you’ll discover on a double-page spread inside, of a bicycle race through an eroded quarry in Gentilly, the Paris suburb where many of Doisneau’s pictures were taken. Rising above this scene, and entirely out of place, is the Eiffel Tower, isolated dramatically before yet another photo of a sky filled with foamy clouds” (Roth, The Book of 101 Books). Roth 101. Parr/Badger Vol I. With 130 photos by Doisneau and text by Cendrars.
Provenance: With inscription by Cendrars to Maurice Brianchon (and signed beneath the inscription by Doisneau); Brianchon (1899-1979) was an internationally renowned painter, set designer, and illustrator.
Paris: Pierre Seghers, 1949. Quarto (9 1/2 x 7 in), original cream paper cover, original dust jacket. Book fine, dust jacket with a little bit of edgewear and a tiny piece of clear tape (over a small tear) on verso. A beautiful copy in the rare dust jacket, extremely rare signed by both Cendrars and Doisneau.
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