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Paris Changing is a NY Times Book of Style. · Oct 29, 03:14 PM

The 10/28 edition of The NY Times contained the following review in the Sunday style section:

PARIS CHANGING
Revisiting Eugène Atget’s Paris.
By Christopher Rauschenberg.
192 pp. Princeton ArchitecturalPress.
$40.00
AVAILABLE NOW

“TWO years ago, an exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York showcased 100 photographs of New York City. Fifty had been taken by the photographer Berenice Abbott, and had appeared in her famous book “Changing New York.” The other 50 were “rephotographs,” by the photographer Douglas Levere, who used the same camera she used decades earlier to reshoot the locations she chose, showing how time had changed them.”

“Move ahead a couple of years, and you see an offshoot of this fertile show. Princeton Architectural Press has released “Paris Changing” rephotographs of scenes shot by the Parisian photographer Eugène Atget from 1897 to 1927, the year he died.”

“At the same time that Levere was retracing Abbott’s steps, the American photographer Christopher Rauschenberg retraced Atget’s in 1990’s Paris. In this new book, Atget’s and Mr. Rauschenberg’s images sit side by side, eerily similar.”

“Their Paris looks dreamily static: not a city that never sleeps, but a city that never wakes.”

“The effect is ghostly; on page after page, the architecture, streets and statuary are nearly identical, the differences of 100 years mostly cosmetic. Look at Atget’s photograph of a gabled building near Les Halles in 1907, and you see its tall soot-stained gate, dwarfed by the Gothic arches of the St.-Eustache church.”

“Look at Mr. Rauschenberg’s rephotograph from 1997, and you see the same stones, arches and fences — now grime-free. It’s as if history’s lens had been dusted.”

“There is one important difference: in the 1907 photo, a man in a cap and baggy trousers (looking like a van Gogh mailman) stands beside a horse. In the update, a slender Parisian mother pushes a baby in a stroller.”

“Buildings remain; but what has become of the man with the horse? And where will the baby be in 2087, when St.-Eustache stands tall? “Paris Changing” is an invitation to a nostalgic voyage, or, to a long Paris weekend, during which you can use the photographs as a guide and return to New York with fresh eyes.”

Also Available

New York Changing: Revisiting Berenice Abbott’s New York

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