A city built on two millennia of history, Paris is entering the third century of its love story with photography. It was on the banks of the Seine that Niepce and Daguerre officially gave birth to this new art that has flourished ever since, developing a distinctive language and becoming a vital tool of knowledge. Paris, Portrait of a City leads us through what Goethe described as “universal city where every step upon a bridge or a square recalls a great past, where a fragment of history is unrolled at the corner of every street.” This history is recounted in photographs, all the way from Daguerre’s incunabula to the most recent images. In fact, Paris can claim to be the only city in the world whose archives house an almost complete record of over a century and a half of transformations. This huge panorama of nearly 600 pages and as many photographs makes Paris, Portrait of a City unique. This book brings together the past and the present, the monumental and the...