Nichole Robertson

A unique type of travelogue combining the eyes of a photographer, graphic artist, and diarist makes for an entertaining afternoon of reading and perusing. The volume alternates whimsical accounts from the unfolding of a leisurely day spent in the Île Saint-Louis and the Île de la Cité, the two natural islands in the middle of Paris, in which the narrator makes up stories about the people - or in one case a statue - she sees, and photographs that accompany that scene. The narrations are 2-3 pages each and the following photos 3-5 pages each, printed in attractive color on good matte paper. It's a fun interplay of text and photography.

I like that the book only tries to show a small part of the city, rather than rushing all over the place. More volumes in this series will hopefully be coming out featuring other sections of Paris, and I can't wait to see them.

I highly recommend reading this book outdoors in the sun. I began it inside my house and it didn't feel right, so I took it to a coffee shop (okay, a Starbucks... give me a break, it's Arkansas) and sat at an outdoor table in the afternoon sun with my coffee and the book and enjoyed a most relaxing hour or so.… (mais)

I enjoy Nichole Robertson's aesthetic in her photography of Paris, as displayed in this book: simple, but not insipid; down to earth, but not gritty; still, but alive. No other reviewer here has mentioned it I don't think, but there is a somewhat startling aspect of this volume: all these photographs, in daytime, in a major metropolitan area like Paris, and there are no people. Outdoor chairs, baked bread, walls, bicycles, sidewalks, cafe signs, but no people. Gives it some of the appeal of those works of photographs of abandoned places, which are fascinating, only here nature has not yet reclaimed anything. It's photography of the world we humans have made and maintained, just without us in it.

If, like me, you love words and text and feel their absence even in a work of visual art, check out the author's Paris Journal, which combines her photography of Paris with story, though her photography evolves: a few of the photos include a person! Solitary figures only though, nothing crazy...… (mais)

The author takes photographs of various bookstores seen throughout France and other sites, interspersing them with literary quotes.

I loved the idea of this book and was hoping for some really neat literary sites of France, like places where famous authors wrote or were inspired by. There are a few of those, but the majority are just photographs of bookstore shelves taken so up close that it's virtually impossible to distinguish these as being French bookstores versus anywhere else in the world. In one of them, I actually caught a glimpse of an Archie comic.

Furthermore, nothing is captioned. There's a long list of sites at the end of the book but these are listed alphabetically, making it not the most helpful tool in the world when you're on page 82 and want to know what this building with columns is or why it is significant. A brief timeline of some literary events in France's history rounds out the backmatter.

This seems like the type of book for those folks who love the actual physical object of a book, which is a totally fine attitude to have that I think would probably be satisfied by seeing the photographs of books of all sizes, colors, bindings, etc. But if, like me, you're more concerned about the informational content of a nonfiction book, this one is very slim on that.… (mais)