On the last page of Mark Steinmetz’s 2006 book South Central there is a small acknowledgment that reads ‘Dedicated to France and its great photographers.’ France, the birthplace of photography, and more importantly to Steinmetz, the country where his mother was born is also where the first image to record a human figure was made. In 1839 Louis Daguerre took a photograph of the Boulevard du Temple in Paris and, by chance, captured a man getting his shoe shined who stayed still long enough to be recorded within the ten-minute exposure. This is the start of what has become a very long and engaged tradition of photographing a city that has spanned the lives of many great photographers including the likes of Eugene Atget, Andre Kertesz, Brassai, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Mark Steinmetz’s newest book from Nazraeli Press called Paris In My Time, offers homage to the city of lights.
