$40.00 U.S. (trade discount)
E-book TBD.
Clothbound with jacket
120 pages with 54 tritones
8.0″ x 9.0″ upright/portrait
ISBN 978–1–938086–88–5
Published in March 2022
Distributed by Casemate/IPM
www.casemateipm.com
by Michael Kolster
Afterword by Michelle Kuo
(English/French bilingual edition)
Michael Kolster renders Paris’s parks like no one since photographer Eugène Atget a century ago.
Paris Park Photographs features a three-part sequence of images from public parks and gardens in and near France’s capital city. Exploring many of the same places that photographer Eugène Atget (1857–1927) visited a century ago, Michael Kolster references their trees, flowers, and plants, watercourses, swans, and sculpture, unkempt and formally designed spaces, tempered by the knowledge that the bustle of the city is only a few short steps away. These views of well-known parks and gardens invite closer scrutiny of the encounters awaiting us at the edges of the well-worn paths defining our daily lives.
Few people venture into the frame of Kolster’s photographs, but the promise of renewal resides in the details of his many visual encounters and moments of heightened attention. Each picture seems to speak to us as a special moment in time, and the carefully sequenced plates offer a shifting, dynamic view of these famous places.
Paris Park Photographs also includes an essay by Kolster and an afterword by Michelle Kuo about her time in Paris’s parks and the significance of Kolster’s photographs in understanding them. The book is presented in an elegant bilingual English/French edition, and its design is inspired by Walker Evans’s 1938 classic work, American Photographs, making Kolster’s book of immediate interest to photo and book collectors.
About
About the Author
Michael Kolster is a professor of art at Bowdoin College and a recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in Photography. His photographs have been exhibited widely and are in numerous collections, including the American University of Paris, Brown University, Center for Creative Photography, George Eastman House of Film and Photography, High Museum of Art, Huntington Library, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Princeton University Art Museum, Smith College Museum of Art, and Williams College Museum of Art. His previous books are Take Me to the River: Photographs of Atlantic Rivers (George F. Thompson Publishing, 2016) and L.A. River (George F. Thompson Publishing, 2019).
About the Contributor
Michelle Kuo is a writer, attorney, and currently an associate professor in the History, Law, and Society program at the American University of Paris. She is the author of Reading with Patrick: A Teacher, a Student, and a Life-Changing Friendship (Random House, 2017), which was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Prize and Goddard Riverside Stephen Russo Bok Prize. She has also published individual pieces in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, The Point, and Public Books, among others.
