"BOULEVARD" par Adam BARTOS. Editions SteidlDangin, New York-Göttingen. 2005. Imprimé en Allemagne. Petit in-4, format oblong, couverture toilée grise sous jaquette photo. Non paginé (120p). Texte en anglais, préface de Geoff Dyer, illustré de 59 reproductions photographiques couleurs pleine page par Adam Bartos.

 

"The photographs in this book pair the cities of Paris and Los Angeles. Paris, famously, was the capital of the 19th century; it is besotted with and dominated by its own history. L.A. is the paradigmatic city without a past. Paris – at least as bound with the Périphérique – is compact, dense. Like New York – or Manhattan at any rate – Paris is a walking city. L.A. sprawls. It's a driving city. Paris is a city of cobbles and impasses; L.A., of freeways. Paris is centripetal; it is always converging on its own centre. L.A. has no centre; to the east it fades into desert; to the west it stops only when confronted by the ocean (where the book begins and ends) … In another way, though, Boulevard is about both places and neither place. It is about somewhere that exists in photographs. One cannot see pictures of certain views of Paris without thinking of Eugène Atget. And one's first thought on seeing colour photographs of America is often of William Eggleston. So this book brings about a dialogue between two ways of seeing, as metonymically expressed by Eggleston and Atget…" Geoff Dyer.

 

Ref LPB0860