Paris Mortel Retouche

Paris Mortel Retouché revisits a body of photographs Johan van der Keuken made in Paris in the late 1950s. It expands a slim 1963 book of the same title into a fuller account of that work.

Van der Keuken moved from Amsterdam to Paris in 1956 to study at a film school there. Over the following years he photographed the city by the thousands, using it as the backdrop for pictures marked by a sense of desolation. A tightly edited selection of that material was published in 1963 as Paris Mortel. This edition was put together with Willem van Zoetendaal and issued by Van Zoetendaal Publishers. It reproduces the original dummy Van der Keuken laid out for the book, along with photographs that had never before been published.

This edition sits alongside the 1963 book rather than replacing it. The retouched title signals a revised, filled-out return to work Van der Keuken had first edited down decades earlier. It restores photographs and the working dummy that the earlier, slimmer edition left out.