Paris Mortel

Paris Mortel is Johan van der Keuken's early photobook of Paris, made while he was still in his twenties and years before he turned primarily to filmmaking.

Published in 1963 by C. de Boer Jr. in Hilversum, the book gathers black-and-white street photographs made in Paris, where van der Keuken had studied at the IDHEC film school; its title, using the French mortel rather than a Dutch equivalent, signals the somber, elegiac register of the images. A revised and expanded edition, retitled Paris mortel retouché and co-credited to Willem van Zoetendaal, was published by Van Zoetendaal Publishers in 2013, fifty years after the original.

Van der Keuken (1938-2001) is best known internationally as a documentary filmmaker, but he began as a photographer, publishing his first book, Wij zijn 17 (We Are 17), while still a teenager. Paris Mortel belongs to this early photographic period before his move into cinema, a medium in which he continued to work with still and moving images side by side for the rest of his career.