Doisneau Paris

A little over three years ago, Gingko Press published Atget Paris, a beautiful collection of 840 b&w photos taken by Eugene Atget in the years before his death in 1927. Now Doisneau Paris, by Brigitte Ollier, takes up where that volume left off. Robert Doisneau, who died in 1994, began taking photos of the city in the 1930s, but the bulk of the 650 b&w photographs in this collection are from the 1940s, '50s and '60s. From the deprivations of war (a girl's first communion in a basement shelter) to the demolition of progress (Doisneau's lyrical portraits of Les Halles over the decades ends with its demolition and the opening of the egregious Forum des Halles). This is a truly marvelous collection, portraying people going about their daily business in a city that is never mundane.