Peter Turnley loves Paris. He just released yesterday his latest book: “Paris Je t’aime – 50 Years of Photographs”. It is magnum opus of 320 pages and it is gorgeous!
There are hundreds of books about Paris, its streets, monuments, lovers on the banks of the river Seine… but this one is different, maybe because Peter Turnley chose to live there 50 years ago and that his eye on the city remains fresh, amazed and full of tenderness. His images are very much in the lineage of the great humanists photographers.
The book in limited edition is exclusively available on his website and, every copy will be signed,
In his preface, Peter writes :
“Being a Parisian is not about being born in Paris, it is about being reborn there.” — Sacha Guitry
I have now lived in Paris for fifty years. I first arrived in the fall a day in September 1975 at the age of twenty. Instilled in the young man I was, who boarded his first bus ride into Paris from Charles de Gaulle Airport that day, were a very important set of family values, ideas, and beliefs regarding our “family of men and women” and regarding human equality, the beauty of diversity, empathy, and compassion for those less fortunate than I. My foundational belief was and remains that one should try to make the world a better place.
From that first day in Paris, and over the following five decades, my life and my world were reborn. I immediately became passionate about the French language, and for my first eight months in Paris, I refused to speak a word of English so that I would learn French as quickly as possible and become part of the society and culture of Paris and, I hoped, not only see but feel all that was around me.
I believe we are all part of an ever-evolving construction; none of us has invented the wheel. Since first picking up a camera at the age of sixteen, I have been enchanted by the photographs of Dorothea Lange, Lewis Hine, Jacob Riis, Eugene Smith, Robert Capa, Robert Frank, Bruce Davidson, and so many other photographers who employed photography to inform and open the hearts of all who witness the world.
Once settled in France, I sought out my heroes of French photography: Henri Cartier-Bresson, André Kertész, Edouard Boubat, Robert Doisneau, Josef Koudelka, and many others. Most of these people were not only my mentors but became my friends. I’ll always remember finding Robert Doisneau’s number in the phone book and cold calling him one day. I introduced myself on the phone and told him I didn’t want anything from him—I just wanted to be in the presence of the spirit of the person who had made those photographs. I went on to be his assistant for a time in the early 1980s and was always touched as much by his humanity as by his photographs.
I have never tried to describe life in Paris. I have always been much more interested in feeling it and offering others the chance to feel it as well.
Over my life in photography, I have documented most of the world’s important news stories and have traveled to more than ninety countries. I have witnessed most of the wars in the world during this time, natural and man-made disasters, and major world socioeconomic and geopolitical change. I was in Iraq, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Somalia, Kosovo, Bosnia, Chechnya, Haiti, and many more locations.
I witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall, the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe, and Nelson Mandela coming out from twenty-seven years of incarceration.
Amid all of this which has profoundly impacted my heart, there has been one constant: I have always returned to Paris, my adopted home, which has been a necessary and essential balm to my soul.
Anyone who knows Paris well knows that like all major metropolitan cities worldwide, Paris, too, has challenges, issues, and problems. But with all of that and I have been attentive to all of it in my visual documentation of life in Paris, Paris is also without a doubt the place in the world with the most spectacular art de vivre, beauty, elegance, grandeur. It is a place where love and romance are experienced with glory, and where life is lived with the knowledge that in the face of the world’s problems, family, friendship, sincerity, sensuality, and love are our only true salvation.
I am in many ways proud of my origins, but I also can say without hesitation that one of the most moving and uplifting days of my life was the day I became a French citizen when France offered me the French nationality.
I share with you here within the pages of this book a visual testament to all that Paris has offered me, and with these photographs, I am grateful to give back to the city, its people and visitors, my love.
Peter Turnley, Paris, March 2025
His new book, “Paris Je t’aime-50 Years of Photographs” is available exclusively on his website : www.peterturnley.com
Peter Turnley – “Paris Je t’aime-50 Years of Photographs”
International Hardcover
320 pages
316 photographs
12.2 inches x 11.8 inches x 1.26 inches. ( 31 x 30 x 3.5 cm )
Limited-Edition—every copy will be signed.
$85.00
About Peter Turnley
Peter Turnley is renowned for his photography of the realities of the human condition. His photographs have been featured on the cover of Newsweek forty-three times and are published frequently in many of the world’s most prestigious publications. He has worked in over ninety countries and has witnessed most major stories of international geopolitical and historic significance in the last forty years. He has both American and French nationality.
Turnley has photographed most of the world’s conflicts, including the Gulf War of 1991, the Balkans (Bosnia), Somalia, Rwanda, South Africa, Chechnya, Haiti, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Indonesia, Afghanistan, Kosovo, the 2003 war in Iraq. He has produced portraits and covered many of the modern world’s most influential people: Obama, Castro, Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Putin, Mandela, Arafat, Schroeder, Ceausescu, Gaddafi, Chirac, Clinton, Reagan, Bush Sr., Lady Diana, and Pope Jean Paul II among others.
Since 1975 Turnley has also continually photographed the life of Paris, his adopted home. He was born in the U.S. but has lived more than half his life in Paris, where he worked as the assistant of the photographer Robert Doisneau in his early days in Paris in 1981.
Turnley has photographed extensively the life of Cuba since 1989 and has published a book Cuba: A Grace of Spirit.
His photographs have been exhibited worldwide, including a major retrospective: “Moments of the Human Condition” at Cuba’s most important museum, “Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes”. Turnley was the first American artist since the Cuban Revolution to have a major retrospective exhibit at Cuba’s most important museum.
His photographs have been exhibited internationally and his signed fine art prints are collected worldwide. His photographs have been exhibited at: Weatherhead Gallery, Ft. Wayne, Indiana, 2009; Agathe Gaillard Galerie, Paris, 2012; Leica Gallery-Salzburg, Austria, 2013; Leica Gallery-Los Angeles, 2014; Leica Gallery-San Francisco, 2014;
Muséo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana, Cuba, 2015 ; Leica Gallery-New York, 2016;
Leica Gallery-Miami, 2014 and 2016, Leica Gallery, Seattle, 2017, Fototeca de Cuba, Havana, Cuba, 2019; “Visa Pour l’Image”, Perpignan, France. 2020; La Gacilly Photo Festival, 2023; L’Hotel de Ville Paris, 2023 .
A graduate of the University of Michigan, the Sorbonne of Paris, and the Institut d’Etudes Politiques of Paris, Turnley has received honorary doctorate degrees from the New School of Social Research in New York, Ohio Wesleyan University and St. Francis College of Indiana. He received a Nieman Fellowship from Harvard for the academic year 2000–2001.
Among the many international awards Turnley has won are the Overseas Press Club Award for Best Photographic Reporting from Abroad, numerous awards and citations from World Press Photo, and the University of Missouri’s Pictures of the Year competition. Peter Turnley was nominated for the top prize in the most important international photojournalism festival, “Visa Pour l’Image” in Perpignan, France in Sept. 2020.
Turnley lives in Paris and has published eight books: Beijing Spring, Moments of Revolution, In Times of War and Peace, Parisians, McClellan Street, French Kiss: A Love Letter to Paris, Cuba: A Grace of Spirit,, A New York-Paris Visual Diary: The Human Face of Covid-19,and The Other California-197 which can be purchased only on his website : www.peterturnley.com
