French Dreams

In 90 photographs a young artist named Steven Rothfeld evokes a dream of France that is exactly as we want to remember it--or imagine it to be.

Taken over seven years of travel, here are landscapes, portraits, still lifes, vignettes, and studies. But here also is a singular vision--these are not like photographs you've seen before, but are unique and unpredictable Polaroid transfers. They begin as 35 mm slides, are transferred to a Polaroid negative, and re then printed onto art paper, giving each a muted, timeworn quality of a relic.

Author Richard Reeves has written an introduction, and accompanying the photographs are quotes celebrating France from such natives and Francophiles as Proust, M.F.K. Fisher, Bauldelaire and Van Gogh, W.S. Merwin, Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, and others. French Dreams is a brilliant debut, a gift, a work of art, a dream of France. Winner of the 1994 Communications Arts Award of Excellence for books of photography.

Steven Rothfeld has been a contributing photographer for European Travel & Life and a contributor to Bon Appetit and Travel & Leisure. Besides his own French Dreams, he is the photographer for such books as Entrez, and Patricia Wells's Trattoria. He is also the photographer for the 365 Days in France Picture-a-Day calendar with text by Patricia Wells, and the 365 Days in Italy Picture-a-Day calendar with text by Patricia Schultz.