A city built on two millennia of history, Paris is entering the third century of its love story with photography. It was on the banks of the Seine that Niépce and Daguerre officially gave birth to this new art that has flourished ever since, developing a distinctive language and becoming a vital tool of knowledge.

Paris: Portrait of a City leads us through what Goethe described as a “universal city where every step upon a bridge or a square recalls a great past, where a fragment of history is unrolled at the corner of every street.” The history of Paris is recounted in photographs ranging from Daguerre’s early incunabula to the most recent images—an almost complete record of over a century and a half of transformations and a vast panorama spanning more than 600 pages and 500 photographs.

This book brings together the past and the present, the monumental and the everyday, objects and people. Images captured by the most illustrious photographe