French Dreams - Hardcover

Rothfeld, Steven

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1563054698 ISBN 13: 9781563054693

Publisher: Workman Publishing, 1993

Synopsis

In 90 photographs a young artist named Steven Rothfeld evokes a dream of France that is exactly as we want to remember it--or imagine it to be.

Taken over seven years of travel, here are landscapes, portraits, still lifes, vignettes, and studies. But here also is a singular vision--these are not like photographs you've seen before, but are unique and unpredictable Polaroid transfers. They begin as 35 mm slides, are transferred to a Polaroid negative, and re then printed onto art paper, giving each a muted, timeworn quality of a relic.

Author Richard Reeves has written an introduction, and accompanying the photographs are quotes celebrating France from such natives and Francophiles as Proust, M.F.K. Fisher, Bauldelaire and Van Gogh, W.S. Merwin, Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, and others. French Dreams is a brilliant debut, a gift, a work of art, a dream of France. Winner of the 1994 Communications Arts Award of Excellence for books of photography.

About this title

From the Back Cover

In this collection of visual enchantment Steven Rothfeld presents a dreamer's celebration of France. It is the France of mist over the vineyards of Beaujolais and a sun-dappled allee in St. Remy; of shadows falling on the Place des Vosges and of fishing nets hung out to dry in Honfleur; of snowbound rowboats on the frozen lake at Versailles and peeling shutters in Provence. It is the France that lives by light, be detail, by what Edith Wharton called the "long familiar intercourse between the earth and its inhabitants."

And it is the France whose singular quality, whose unmistakable Frenchness, is captured not only through the photographer's subject and eye, but through his technique as well. Impressionistic in mood and effect, each photograph in FRENCH DREAMS is a unique, handmade Polaroid transfer whose muted colors and soft lines seem to arise not from a camera, but out of memory itself.

Accompanying the photographs are excerpts from Proust, Colette, Baudelaire, van Gogh, W.S. Merwin, Flaubert, Henry Miller, Henry James, Georges Simenon, Madame de Sevigne, and others.

And it is the France whose singular quality, whose unmistakable Frenchness, is captured not only through the photographer's subject and eye, but through his technique as well. Impressionistic in mood and effect, each photograph in FRENCH DREAMS is a unique, handmade Polaroid transfer whose muted colors and soft lines seem to arise not from a camera, but out of memory itself.

Accompanying the photographs are excerpts from Proust, Colette, Baudelaire, van Gogh, W.S. Merwin, Flaubert, Henry Miller, Henry James, Georges Simenon, Madame de Sevigne, and others.

Edition details

• Publisher: Workman Publishing
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1563054698
• ISBN 13: 9781563054693
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 96