From Publishers Weekly
A little over three years ago, Gingko Press published Atget Paris, a beautiful collection of 840 b&w photos taken by Eugene Atget in the years before his death in 1927. Now Doisneau Paris, by Brigitte Ollier, takes up where that volume left off. Robert Doisneau, who died in 1994, began taking photos of the city in the 1930s, but the bulk of the 650 b&w photographs in this collection are from the 1940s, '50s and '60s. From the deprivations of war (a girl's first communion in a basement shelter) to the demolition of progress (Doisneau's lyrical portraits of Les Halles over the decades ends with its demolition and the opening of the egregious Forum des Halles). This is a truly marvelous collection, portraying people going about their daily business in a city that is never mundane.Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
It is nice to think that the marvelous Atget Paris (1993) demanded this volume (which, like it, is the size of a Parisian paving stone) to dispel its loneliness. Doisneau's Parisian views could well do that, for they are as full of humanity as Atget's are empty of it. People figure in Atget's documentary scenes only accidentally, but virtually every one of Doisneau's pictures features people walking, running, working, playing, dancing, eating, drinking, and even facing down the photographer with eyes mock-sternly glaring over their eyeglass frames. Quite absent, however, are tragedy and pain; though the setting be bleak, as in the shots of Paris' suburbs during and just after the war, the faces we see are usually smiling. Doisneau's work commenced a few years after Atget's death (1927), and the bulk of the images here come from the 1940s through the 1960s. Paris changed immensely during this time; indeed, one chapter demonstrates change in chronologically successive images of the old produce market of Les Halles, razed in 1971. No matter the changes, to Doisneau's eye Paris is where life is truly lived, quite often delightfully. Ray Olson

Book Description
After the remarkable success of Atget Paris, a work 'Newsweek' called 'one of the great works of art of the last centuries', and the publication in 1994 of Marville Paris, comes the richly evocative Doisneau Paris, completing the Paris Trilogy. With this third and final volume the modern period in Paris is seen through the eyes of one of this century's most celebrated and respected photographers. This is not though just a book about Paris. It is more significantly the most important book yet to appear on the photography of Robert Doisneau. Doisneau is the photographer of Paris 'par excellence' and this book will have a lasting appeal for demonstrating the power of Doisneau's images like never before.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly