Clothbound with jacket 120 pages with 54 tritones

Afterword by Michelle Kuo

BILINGUAL English/French

8.0" x 9.0" upright/portrait

Paris Park Preview

Inspired by Eugene Atget (1857—1927), Michael explored several parks and gardens in and around Paris allowing himself the time to wander from formal sculpted gardens out to the unkempt edges. Atget eschewed the smaller, more convenient film cameras of his time to make photographs using a view camera with glass plates. Like Atget, Michael also used a slightly outmoded form of photography to make the images on medium format film which hem later developed upon his return home. Free from the impulse to review digital images immediately, Michael could focus on the environment and find that meditative quality of being fully present in the moment. What better way to explore the city. With this heightened awareness, Michael’s attentive eye brings the viewer to see the choreography of the sculpted gardens as they transition from formal design to natural landscape. It is an intimate view that can only be witnessed by slowing down to observe carefully, with thoughtful intent. The afterward, written by Michelle Kuo in 2021 provides the perspective of an American living in Paris, while experiencing the city and its parks during the unprecedented time of the COVID-19 pandemic. Through her familial experience of emerging from months of lockdown, drawn to open spaces such as Paris’ parks with an acute awareness of the value and importance of our connection to the land, Michelle reflects upon our collective experience of this time in history. Through Michelle’s perspective we are also given a glimpse of the parallels between the transformative experience of today’s world to that of Walker Evans’ documentation of the Eastern United States, also at a time of profound transformation in the 1930’s. In Michael Kolster’s photographs, we behold the magnificence of a knotted old oak, its creaturely, otherworldly presence. Our eyes follow an allée of pruned trees in Parc de Sceaux, their arrogant geometry on display. A brick rampart. Daffodils poking out of tall grasses. Dark, shapely boughs curving this way and that, meandering and twisting. These photographs reward extended looking.

— Michelle Kuo

Paris Park Photographs is Michael’s third book made with George F. Thompson Publishing and is sure to be another handsome edition. It is designed to respectfully emulate Walker Evans’ American Photographs, published in 1938 by MoMA, which was pivotal in establishing the fine art potential of the photographer’s book in the 20 th century.