Peter Turnley
SELECTED WORKS
French Kiss. A Love Letter to Paris
Peter Turnley felt in love with Paris from the instant he first Ianded in this city in 1975. He has now lived in Paris and photographed the life of this city for almost forty years.
As Peter Turnley career in photography took off, he began to travel widely but he would always return home to Paris, his adopted city, to walk with joy and photograph life in the streets and on the riverbanks. Possibly more than in any other city in the world, the visual landscape of Paris presents a constant expression of the beauty and power of love, seen through the tender kisses and embraces that can be publicly seen, literally anywhere, at any time, and always.
Peter Turnley felt in love with Paris from the instant he first Ianded in this city in 1975. He has now lived in Paris and photographed the life of this city for almost forty years.
As Peter Turnley career in photography took off, he began to travel widely but he would always return home to Paris, his adopted city, to walk with joy and photograph life in the streets and on the riverbanks. Possibly more than in any other city in the world, the visual landscape of Paris presents a constant expression of the beauty and power of love, seen through the tender kisses and embraces that can be publicly seen, literally anywhere, at any time, and always.
VIDEOS
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Since 1975, Turnley has also continually photographed the life of Paris, his adopted home. Turnley was born in the U.S., but has lived more than half his life in Paris. His tender, humorous, and sensual view of Paris, offers distinct contrast to the stark realities depicted in his photojournalism. He has photographed the extensively the life of Paris these past 35 years. Turnley worked as the assistant to the famous French photographer Robert Doisneau in Paris in the early 1980’s.
A graduate of the University of Michigan, the Sorbonne of Paris, and the Institut d’Etudes Politiques of Paris, Turnley has received Honorary Doctorate degrees from the New School of Social Research in New York and St. Francis College of Indiana. He received a Nieman Fellowship from Harvard for the academic year 2000-2001.
Turnley’s photographs have been featured in Newsweek, Harper’s, Stern, Paris Match, Geo, LIFE, National Geographic, The London Sunday Times, VSD, Le Figaro, Le Monde, New Yorker, and DoubleTake. Peter Turnley worked on contract for the Newsweek Magazinefrom 1986-2001 and as a contributing editor/photographer with Harper’s Magazine from 2003-2007. His work is frequently published in photo essay form in magazines, on major television networks such as CNN, ABC’s “Nightline”, and in online publications, such as The Online Photographer. Turnley’s photographs have been published the world over and have won many international awards including the Overseas Press Club Award for Best Photographic Reporting from Abroad.
Turnley has photographed most of the world’s conflicts of the last decade including the Gulf War-1991, the Balkans (Bosnia), Somalia, Rwanda, South Africa, Chechnya, Haiti, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Indonesia, Afghanistan, Kosovo, the war in Iraq-2003. He witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall and the revolutions in Eastern Europe in 1989, the liberation of Nelson Mandela and the end of apartheid in South Africa. He was in New York at “Ground Zero” on Sept 11, 2001, New Orleans during the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, Haiti after the tragic earthquake of 2011, and Egypt during the toppling of Hosni Mubarak in 2011. Turnley has produced portraits and covered many of the modern world’s most influential people including Obama, Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Putin, Mandela, Arafat, Schroeder, Gaddafi, Chirac, Clinton, Reagan, Bush Sr, Lady Diana, and Pope Jean Paul II among others.
He presently lives in both New York and Paris, and has previously published six books of his work: French Kiss – A Love Letter to Paris, Beijing Spring, Moments of Revolution, In Times of War and Peace, Parisians, and McClellan Street.
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