Lucien Hervé - The Eiffel Tower - 2003

FANTASTIC PHOTOGRAPHIC STUDIES from 1938 to the 1990's of the great Paris tower by the architectural photographer Lucien Hervé (1910-2007).
When it opened in 1889 Parisians were appalled by the "useless and monstrous" tower Gustave Eiffel planted in the heart of their beloved city. That enmity, however, was short-lived.
"The Eiffel Tower" is a pictorial study of the great structure by acclaimed architectural photographer Lucien Herve, whose ethereal images convey the balance between the tower's elegant ironwork and its sheer physical force.

Hans-Michael Koetzle, "Eyes on Paris. Paris im Fotobuch. 1890 bis heute" ("Paris in
Photobooks. 1890 until today"), pages 388/389.

Lucien Herve trained as an artist in Vienna and moved to Paris in 1929. He escaped from a German prison camp and fought with the French Resistance in WWII and became an architectural photographer after the war. He was still living in Paris when this was published.

SUPER FRESH AND FLAWLESS COLLECTOR'S CONDITION - LIKE NEW AND UNREAD.

A MUST-HAVE-PUBLICATION for every ambitious collector of Paris photobooks.

Welcome to the auction by Anatole Desachy (France) and Ecki Heuser (Germany) in honor of Paris. To celebrate the 27th edition of „Paris Photo“, the biggest event for photography worldwide, we have gathered 27 photobooks about Paris, each.

IF YOU WIN MORE THAN 1 OF MY BOOKS IN THIS AUCTION, YOU WILL PAY ONLY 1 X SHIPPING COSTS -WORLDWIDE.

Princeton Architectural Press, New York. 2003. First edition, first printing.

Hardcover with dustjacket. 150 x 235 mm. 96 pages. 59 photos (54 photos in black and white, 5 in color). Photos: Lucien Hervé. Layout dustjacket: Deb Wood. Text: Barry Bergdoll. Text in English.

Wonderful book by Lucien Hervé about the Eiffel Tower in Paris - in perfect condition.

"Even if the title promises otherwise, this is - strictly speaking - not a book about the Eiffel Tower, not another homage to a building that has made it from one of the most controversial pieces of Parisian architecture to the city's landmark and thus to ‘one of the most photographed buildings in Paris, if not the world’. First and foremost, this is a book about seeing. It is the printed résumé of a search for expression. And it is proof of an autodidactic training in perception - with the Eiffel Tower, as colossal as it is filigree, as the exclusive object of image research. It is well known that the photographic avant-garde of the 1920s and 30s repeatedly rubbed up against the Eiffel Tower. Nowhere else in Paris could the precepts of a new way of seeing - the steep view from top to bottom or from bottom to top, the interest in contrasts and structures, or the interest in modern materials such as iron and steel - be found.
Nowhere else in Paris could the imperatives of a new way of seeing - the steep view from top to bottom or from bottom to top, the interest in contrasts and structures or in modern materials such as iron and steel - be better fulfilled than at the Eiffel Tower, which is located within easy reach of a few metro stations.
From Man Ray to Kertész, from Moï Ver to Germaine Krull: there is no representative of photographic modernism who has not left us their interpretation of the Eiffel Tower. What sets Hervé apart from the more prominent names is that his artistic involvement with the subject spanned more than five decades, making it practically congruent with his artistic CV. Born in Hungary in 1910, Lucien Hervé came to Paris in the late 1920s. In the epicentre of the avant-garde, he initially eked out a living as a bank clerk, dilettante fashion designer, secretary of the Communist Party and occasional interior designer.
Like so many of his generation, he came to photography by chance and necessity. The illustrated magazines of those years craved pictures.
And so photography eventually became a reasonably secure source of income for him, who only had a moderate command of the local language. Hervé produced reportages and portraits. After the war, he became the house photographer of the architect Le Corbusier. As such, he has gone down in the history of the medium. The beginning of his pictorial exploration of the Eiffel Tower dates back to 1938.
The original plan was to produce a reportage on the upcoming fiftieth anniversary of the building. However, the subject quickly became a major challenge for the photographer - not in the sense of any kind of documentation, but with a view to exploring his own artistic syntax. Hervé is equipped with a Rolleiflex (with fixed optics and no adjustment options), which in principle is not very suitable for architectural photography.
But his photographic modernity is not expressed in the technology he uses, but in his curiosity, his love of experimentation, his humour and, above all, his patience in enduring a set for many years. Interrupted by war, flight and the Resistance - the period in which Lászlo Elkán became the photographer and artist Lucien Hervé - he resumed his visual exploration in 1944. Hervé's last pictures of the Eiffel Tower were taken in 1992.
building - ‘uniquely faithful to Gustave Eiffel's creation.’
Published while Hervé was still alive (he died in June 2007), this slim book presents a chronological overview of his visual exploration of the Eiffel Tower:
A theme in almost infinite variations, an encyclopaedia of photographic encyclopaedia of photographic strategies and personal expression. According to Olivier Beer, Herve emerged from the Eiffel Tower ‘like others from an art academy. In it, he found the nourishment for his path to modernity. Or, to put it in the words of the editor: ‘In a very real way, Eiffel's tower had been nothing less than a catalyst for the invention of the photographer Lucien Hervé.’
(Hans-Michael Koetzle)