In case you ever had any doubts, Paris is the most romantic city on earth. It is a place of intimate wonderment where eyes meet and connect, where kisses linger, where hands feel their way to the future and embraces hold the emotions of the past against the gorgeous background of cafés, monuments, metro stations, the Seine. Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Doisneau, among many others, have left us a wonderful artistic record of all this, but their work dates far back into the last century and is redolent of anachronism. One might doubt that modern Paris could hold, still, so many marvelous emotional moments. But Peter Turnley, who made his international reputation documenting the drama and suffering in conflict zones around the world, has just published a book of photographs that he calls French Kiss: A Love Letter to Paris. For more than three decades, whenever Turnley finished his assignments in the killing fields and refugee camps of the world, he always returned to his home in the City of Lights. And maybe because Turnley is American coming from afar, and because he has seen so much suffering, so much bloodshed, there is a special sensitivity and sweetness in these images. Here are men and women, boys and girls, parents and children, the gay, the playful, the elderly, the puzzled, the passionate, the complicit and the carnal. This is Paris as you dream about it, and as it is.
Peter Turnley
