Paris: City of Light

“Nothing to Paris can ever be compared.”–Eustache Deschamps, 1375

Anyone who has visited Paris understands it is the city by which others may be measured, in inexhaustible place that takes root in one’s soul.

Countless people– artists, tourists, professional photographers– have taken the city’s measure. But Mimmo Jodice is the first to capture Paris as it catapults into an unknown future. Jodice’s Paris is not the romanticized Paris of the popular imagination; it is a city undergoing a radical transformation. Before his lens, Paris is unfamiliar; even its landmarks vibrate with movement and possibility. In these extraordinary photographs, Jodice disrupts conventional notions of time and space, revealing Paris’s momentum as it verges upon the millennium.

“As an artist,” wrote Nietzsche, “a man has no home…save Paris.” Throughout the centuries, this city has been a thematic focus for artists of all kinds, from François Rabelais to Claude Simon, from Benevenuto Cellini to Maurice Utrillo. The very first photography Daguerre made was of a Parisian street, pedestrians smudged out of existence by the long exposure. Later photographers– Atget, Doisneau, Cartier-Bresson, and countless others– have all documented what they saw of the unique life and beauty of the city. But not until now has a photographer captured the city itself in transition. Jodice’s Paris is both a familiar Paris– a Paris of classical grace– and one of sharp-edged raw newness and speed.

From a still, rain-glazed alley in the Latin Quarter to the sleek geometry of I. M. Pei’s pyramid at the Louvre; from a moment of silent intimacy with one of the sculptures at the Musée Rodin to a superhighway careening through a tangle of glass towers– Jodice discovers in Paris the soul within the inanimate, the whirlwind of life that secretly infuses the very stones of the city. Spaces designed for human interaction– a banquet hall, gardens, museum steps, a Metro station– although conspicuously vacant, tremble with vitality.

In City of Light , Jodice’s remarkable photographs are supplemented by reflections on the city by some of history’s greatest writers and thinkers– including Charles Baudelaire, F. T. Marinetti, Raymond Queneau, and others. Their words together with Jodice’s luminous photographs provide a renewed vision of the world’s best-loved city, by one of the world’s most revered photographers.

Jodice’s photographs in City of Light were commissioned by the City of Paris and are part of an exhibition opening in May 1998 at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris.

“Through the images featured in this book, Mimmo Jodice joins the prestigious lineage of the city’s photographers who, like Marville or Atget, have known how to celebrate, through their art, Paris and her metamorphoses.”–Jean-Luc Monterosso, Director, Maison Européenne de la Photographie, from the Foreword