Parisian Views

Rating:
Summary: a very interesting piece of reading
Review: I am Ms.Rice's student from Bogazici University in Turkey. I have read a couple of chapters of this book yet, however only that much was enough to take my attention and keep me going on. The things that normally we know nothing and do not really wonder much about is presented in a way that would attract intention from both proffesional and amateur readers. Its language is a little bit difficult but the content is very interesting. It is very obvious that a real amount of effort has been put in creation of this book.

Rating:
Summary: Photography and spiritual dislocation in Haussmann's Paris
Review: Rice produced a fascinating study of Parisian photography in the age of Haussmannization, when artists predicted and hundreds of thousands literally watched their familiar Old Paris uprooted and its sites of historic memory obliterated one by one. The book makes a nice contrast to T.J. Clark's The Painting of Modern Life in its sensitivity to the worldview of the historical agents themselves. Whereas Clark sees in modernist paintings a failure of Parisians to recognize the ongoing class struggle and the embourgeoisement of the proletariat, Rice pays more attention to the actual discourse of mobility, loss of unity, fragmentation of meaning, and a sense of loss of self in this constantly changing "soulless" city. Its inhabitants are alienated in time as much as in space, and the one most sensitive to this change (Baudelaire) acknowledges the degree to which urban space has come to inject social meaning in his most private and intimate affairs: love. The book equally deserves high praise for its beautiful and moving prose. Plus, it has plenty of fun pictures! Rice, without a doubt, lives and breathes the world of the people she depicts. It is the most enjoyable and powerful book I read in this entire school year, and for a grad student in history at Berkeley, that says a lot!

Rating:
Summary: A fascinating study of 19th century Paris
Review: Shelley Rice's superb PARISIAN VIEWS is a stimulating collection of essays on aspects of 19th century photography in Paris, especially during that period of time in which Baron Haussmann was in charge of gutting medieval Paris and rebuilding it as the city we know today. Like a flaneur, the essays range almost randomly over a host of subjects, overlapping to a great deal in the end, but not having a particular or central thesis that permeates them all.

The photographs themselves are both beautiful and profoundly disconcerting. I found myself looking at particular photographs for extended periods of time. One in particular that troubled me was an 1838 photograph by Daguerre of the Boulevard du Temple, one of the first ever made. Because of the long exposure time, despite the boulevard's being an extremely busy street, only a single individual is visible, and he only because he was standing at a boot black to have his boots polished. Otherwise, we see an eerily deserted street, devoid of people. One of the earliest photographic images of a human being in history, if not the earliest, and the man himself was utterly unaware of his historic moment. Many of the photographs in the book inspire reflections along these lines.

Rice's book should be of interest to individuals interested in a variety of subjects: history, the development of photography, art, city planning, and cultural criticism, to name but a few. The focus of the book is not narrowly restricted to any one subject, as the wide-ranging bibliography will demonstrate.

A book that makes a perfect companion volume is the one that Rice credits with inspiring the initial work on this book: Marshall Berman's ALL THAT IS SOLID MELTS INTO AIR, which traces developments in modernism in the past two centuries. All his chapters are exciting and riveting, but one of the finest is the one on Haussmannization, both in Paris and elsewhere, in places like New York with the work of Robert Moses. In addition to Berman, the ghosts of Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin hover over many of the pages in the book.