FROM THE LIBRARY OF DOISNEAU’S FORMER ASSISTANT, PHOTOJOURNALIST PETER TURNLEY

DOISNEAU, Robert. Pour que Paris soit. [So that Paris exists]. Paris: Éditions Cercle d'Art, (1956). Quarto, original black photographic French wraps over stiff paper boards. $400.

First edition, a tribute to “the joie de vivre of the people and atmosphere of the city Doisneau loved” (McDarrah, 113), with 160 rich black-and-white heliogravures. From the collection of Doisneau’s onetime assistant, award-winning Newsweek photographer Peter Turnley.

In Pour que Paris soit, the vibrant beauty and everyday excitement of Paris is celebrated through the vision of Robert Doisneau (1912-94), a leading figure of French humanist photography "whose elegant black-and-white photographs seem the perfect embodiment of Gallic wit and romance" (New York Times). Here Doisneau pays tribute to the city with the characteristic "sprightly social observation that would come to define his work" (Roth, 132): luminous images of Picasso's "Guenica" at the Louvre, of Georges Braques and Raymond Queneau, of butchers, students at the Sorbonne, seamstresses and street cleaners. First edition, text in French by Elsa Triolet. See Parr & Badger I:201; Szarkowski, 172. From the collection of noted photojournalist Peter Turnley, who once served as Doisneau's assistant and has since covered "almost every important international news event of the last 15 years" for Newsweek and Harper's Magazine (New York Times); signed by Turnley.