Parisian Views [Hardcover]

Shelley Rice (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1997

During the Second Empire (1852-1870), Baron Haussmann and Emperor Napoleon III reconstructed Paris into the "City of Light". The government and other public institutions commissioned many photographers - among them Charles Marville, Henri Le Secq, Edouard-Denis Baldus, and Gustav Le Gray - to record the old Parisian architecture and to document the demolition and reconstruction. Shelly Rice explores not only the literal connections between photography and the transformation of Paris but also the metaphorical ones. All of the essays revolve around a central theme - the creation of modern urban space, in both two and three demensions, and the impact of this space on the lives of those who walked the streets of the 19th century.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This is a remarkable book—the kind found very rarely—that provides unique and in-depth theoretical insight, accessible discussions, a felicitous design, and many extraordinary photographic reproductions."
—Parachute --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

Art historian and critic Shelley Rice has published, taught, curated, and lectured widely in the United States and Europe. She is on the faculties of New York University and the School of Visual Arts. Her columns have appeared in the Village Voice, the Soho Weekly News, and Artforum. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 267 pages
• Publisher: Mit Pr (October 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262181843
• ISBN-13: 978-0262181846
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,879,778 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Photography and spiritual dislocation in Haussmann's Paris, November 20, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Parisian Views (Hardcover)

Rice produced a fascinating study of Parisian photography in the age of Haussmannization, when artists predicted and hundreds of thousands literally watched their familiar Old Paris uprooted and its sites of historic memory obliterated one by one. The book makes a nice contrast to T.J. Clark's The Painting of Modern Life in its sensitivity to the worldview of the historical agents themselves. Whereas Clark sees in modernist paintings a failure of Parisians to recognize the ongoing class struggle and the embourgeoisement of the proletariat, Rice pays more attention to the actual discourse of mobility, loss of unity, fragmentation of meaning, and a sense of loss of self in this constantly changing "soulless" city. Its inhabitants are alienated in time as much as in space, and the one most sensitive to this change (Baudelaire) acknowledges the degree to which urban space has come to inject social meaning in his most private and intimate affairs: love. The book equally deserves high praise for its beautiful and moving prose. Plus, it has plenty of fun pictures! Rice, without a doubt, lives and breathes the world of the people she depicts. It is the most enjoyable and powerful book I read in this entire school year, and for a grad student in history at Berkeley, that says a lot!

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A fascinating study of 19th century Paris, August 31, 2003

By 

Robert Moore (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Parisian Views (Paperback)

Shelley Rice's superb PARISIAN VIEWS is a stimulating collection of essays on aspects of 19th century photography in Paris, especially during that period of time in which Baron Haussmann was in charge of gutting medieval Paris and rebuilding it as the city we know today. Like a flaneur, the essays range almost randomly over a host of subjects, overlapping to a great deal in the end, but not having a particular or central thesis that permeates them all.

The photographs themselves are both beautiful and profoundly disconcerting. I found myself looking at particular photographs for extended periods of time. One in particular that troubled me was an 1838 photograph by Daguerre of the Boulevard du Temple, one of the first ever made. Because of the long exposure time, despite the boulevard's being an extremely busy street, only a single individual is visible, and he only because he was standing at a boot black to have his boots polished. Otherwise, we see an eerily deserted street, devoid of people. One of the earliest photographic images of a human being in history, if not the earliest, and the man himself was utterly unaware of his historic moment. Many of the photographs in the book inspire reflections along these lines.

Rice's book should be of interest to individuals interested in a variety of subjects: history, the development of photography, art, city planning, and cultural criticism, to name but a few. The focus of the book is not narrowly restricted to any one subject, as the wide-ranging bibliography will demonstrate.

A book that makes a perfect companion volume is the one that Rice credits with inspiring the initial work on this book: Marshall Berman's ALL THAT IS SOLID MELTS INTO AIR, which traces developments in modernism in the past two centuries. All his chapters are exciting and riveting, but one of the finest is the one on Haussmannization, both in Paris and elsewhere, in places like New York with the work of Robert Moses. In addition to Berman, the ghosts of Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin hover over many of the pages in the book.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing, February 25, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Parisian Views (Hardcover)

This book begins with the first photograph ever taken, in 1838, in Paris, which co-incides with the beginning of Paris' physical modernisation (under Hausmann in the 1850's). Two parallel tracks: of the development of photography and how that influenced our *viewing* of the physical world; of the development of urban-planned and -modernised Paris and how that influenced our viewing of a city. Both developments began with a difinitive demarcation from the past. I can't remember if I've ever read a *scholarly* anlysis that has been so *lively* and immediate.