New York Up And Down

Renowned documentary photographer Jean-Pierre
Laffont has been a transplanted resident from Paris to New York City since 1965. In his travels that have documented the entirety of America and
its social forces -- as well as those around the world from 1960 to 1990 -- he has squarely focused his camera on his new “hometown” New York City. Demonstrating the people, places, and events
with the same insight that he has the rest of the world, here is an elegant,
incisive, and unexpected “review” of forty years of exploration by one of the
most revered documentarians working today. Just as he explored the explosive, the calm, the social, the environment, in his prize-winning book, Photographer’s Paradise, this book is filled with
the highs and lows of New York city life.

Not a commentary on the high end versus the low end of lifestyles, it is instead a commentary on the ups and downs socially, politically, and visually that have taken place in the city he loves so much, through the eyes of a devoted viewer, over the past 40 years. As explained by Joan Juliet Buck, the foreword-writer who is no casual observer herself: “When the young Frenchman Jean-Pierre Laffont arrived at JFK airport in March of 1965, he was greeted by a smell of hot dogs and yellow mustard that he’d known as a child on the American army bases in Morocco, where he remembered smiling GIs giving him licorice-flavored chewing gum. He was ready to respond to New York with his heart; over the next fifty years, as he became one of the world’s top photojournalists, he never stopped tracking the city’s dream of itself. He captured the exhilaration it provokes, the disappointment it metes out. Each of the photographs in this remarkable book about the city Laffont made his home, captures the longing, the bravado, the blatancy of New York, and its monumental mess.”

This is a book not to be missed by anyone who has ever visited, would like to visit, lived in, or has any curiosity at all about the “real” New York city, as seen through the eyes of a true visionary.