In this collection of visual enchantment Steven Rothfeld presents a dreamer's celebration of France. It is the France of mist over the vineyards of Beaujolais and a sun-dappled allee in St. Remy; of shadows falling on the Place des Vosges and of fishing nets hung out to dry in Honfleur; of snowbound rowboats on the frozen lake at Versailles and peeling shutters in Provence. It is the France that lives by light, be detail, by what Edith Wharton called the "long familiar intercourse between the earth and its inhabitants."
And it is the France whose singular quality, whose unmistakable Frenchness, is captured not only through the photographer's subject and eye, but through his technique as well. Impressionistic in mood and effect, each photograph in FRENCH DREAMS is a unique, handmade Polaroid transfer whose muted colors and soft lines seem to arise not from a camera, but out of memory itself.
Accompanying the photographs are excerpts from Proust, Colette, Baudelaire, van Gogh, W.S. Merwin, Flaubert, Henry Miller, Henry James, Georges Simenon, Madame de Sevigne, and others.
