Introduction by Joan Juliet Buck
Renowned documentary photographer Jean-Pierre Laffont has been a transplanted resident from Paris to New York City since 1965. In addition to his travels that have documented the entirety of America and its social forces, as well as those around the world, Laffont has squarely focused his camera on his new "hometown" New York City. Organized into three parts (The City Never Sleeps, The Movers and Shakers, and The Mean Streets), New York City Up and Down is an elegant, incisive, and unexpected review of forty years of exploration by one of the most revered documentarians working today.
Just as he explored the explosive, the calm, the social, the environment in his prize-winning book, Photographer's Paradise, Laffont has filled New York City Up and Down with the highs and lows of New York City life. Not a commentary on the high end versus the low end of lifestyles, it is instead a commentary on the ups and downs socially, politically, and visually that have taken place in the city he loves so much, with the eyes of a devoted viewer, over the past forty years.
About the Authors:
Jean-Pierre Laffont attended the School of Graphic Art in Vevey, Switzerland, where he received his master's in photography, prior to serving in the French Army during the Algerian War (for which he received an award for his humanitarian efforts). He is a founding member of the Gamma USA and Sygma Photo News agencies. For more than four decades, Laffont traveled the globe and created work that was published in the world's leading news magazines, including Figaro, London Sunday Times, Newsweek, Paris Match, Stern, and Time. Among the numerous awards Laffont has received are the Overseas Press Club of America's Madeline Dane Ross Award, the World Press Photo General Picture Award, University of Missouri's World Understanding Award, and an award from the New York Newspaper Guild. In 1996 he was honored with the National French Order of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres (a Knight in the National French Order of Arts and Letters). He resides in New York City with his wife and editor, Eliane.
Joan Juliet Buck is an American writer. She was the editor-in-chief of French Vogue from 1994 to 2001, the only American ever to have edited a French magazine. She writes for W Magazine and Harper's Bazaar and was contributing editor to Vogue and Vanity Fair for many years. The author of two novels, she will release a memoir, The Price of Illusion, in March 2017. She lives in upstate New York.
ISBN: 978-1-943876-00-6
240 pages, 10 x 12"; hardcover
