Paris Mortel

Joan van der Keuken’s Paris Mortel is a landmark 1963 Dutch photobook about a city stripped of romantic permanence. The first edition was published in Hilversum by C. de Boer Jr. A verified bibliographic description records a hardcover quarto containing 65 black-and-white photogravures on Japan-fold leaves, with captions in Dutch, French, English, and German (Eric Chaim Kline Books).

A photographer between stills and cinema

Born Joan van der Keuken in Amsterdam in 1938, the photographer later adopted the form Johan. Leiden University’s Depth of Field biography records that he studied at the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques in Paris from 1956 to 1958, remained intensely engaged with photography, and made thousands of pictures of the city (Leiden University).

The photographs selected for Paris Mortel date from October 1956 to August 1958 (Josef Chladek). Leiden’s chronology adds an important publication fact: in 1963 the selection appeared as a promotional gift in an edition of 1,000 copies (Leiden University).

Van der Keuken’s Paris is not a timeless stage for monuments. The sequence moves through streets, Métro Saint-Michel, people, night scenes, children and demonstrations, and Père-Lachaise cemetery; a specialist collation identifies these six sections (Le Plac’Art Photo). Work, class difference, crowds, and solitude give the city its pressure.

William Klein—and a different mood

Accounts of the book place the photographs in the wake of William Klein’s New York, published in 1956. Kline Books quotes Parr and Badger’s description of van der Keuken combining Klein’s American energy with a European undertone of loneliness and desolation (Eric Chaim Kline Books).

The comparison is useful but should not erase van der Keuken’s distinct construction. The title—“Mortal Paris”—rejects the myth of an immortal city. His Paris is contingent and divided, shaped by people whose lives unfold under the pressures of work, politics, poverty, and metropolitan isolation.

Layout as meaning

The book’s achievement lies as much in its sequence and manufacture as in its photographs. Chladek’s record describes images precisely placed within a strong graphic layout that uses empty space for effect, with French-fold pages and deep gravure printing (Josef Chladek). Le Plac’Art gives a collation of 68 pages and 65 pictures and notes that, apart from the index and credits, van der Keuken omitted continuous text (Le Plac’Art Photo).

Empty margins and changes of scale are therefore not decoration. They regulate pace, interrupt continuity, and make one encounter resonate against the next. Paris appears as a series of images joined by movement but separated by silence.

Place in the photobook canon

Paris Mortel appears in Martin Parr and Gerry Badger’s The Photobook: A History, Volume I and in Andrew Roth’s The Open Book, as the Kline record documents (Eric Chaim Kline Books). Its reputation rests on the synthesis of photograph and object: gravure, folded leaves, spacing, and sequence all participate in the work.

Collector’s notes

Collectors should distinguish this 1963 first edition from later reworkings, including Paris mortel retouché. The first edition has grey cloth-covered boards and a blue printed dust jacket; the leaves are folded in the Japanese or French-fold manner (Eric Chaim Kline Books; Le Plac’Art Photo). The jacket, folded edges, and gravure surfaces are vulnerable and should be checked carefully.

Paris Mortel endures because it does not merely gather strong photographs of Paris. It makes the reader experience the modern city as mortal: energetic yet fragile, socially divided, and psychologically charged.

Sources

• Leiden University, Depth of Field: Johan van der Keuken
• Eric Chaim Kline Books
• Josef Chladek
• Le Plac’Art Photo