Paris

Moi Ver: Paris

Edited by Christoph Schifferii.
Introduction by Fernand Leger.

'The book that introduced Moi Ver to the world is exhilaratingly eccentric, definitely avant-garde.... Moi Ver's Paris is a city in motion, hurtling almost out of control. Cobblestone streets, bustling crowds, facades, railway tracks, bridges. the glittering river, and countless monuments shift and shatter here.... Moi Ver's version of Paris was eclipsed two years later by the publication of Brassai's more conventionally seductive Paris de Nuit, but no one has yet matched Moi Ver's vision of the brutal, chaotic, irresistible modern city.'
-Vince Aletti, from the Book of 101 Books

In Paris, his quintessential avant-garde book, Moi Ver succeeded in blending dynamic photographic montage with elaborate graphic layouts. Utilizing the double-spread as one unified place, each turn of the page not only surprised but accentuated the charged rhythm built into the book itself. The bulk of information in these pictures documents mundane street activities in the cobblestone-covered Paris of the late 20s. But the method in which Moi Ver chose to present his material, in its kaliedoscopic layering and frenzied repetitiveness, emphasized an experiential approach to picture construction-as if we, the viewers, were walking about, bombarded by noise and reflected light. Originally published in 1931 by Editions Jeanne Walter with an introduction by Futurist Fernand Leger, now long out of print and exceptionally rare, this facsimile reproduction of Paris brings back into circulation one of the seminal photographic books of the century.

Born in 1904 in Vilnius, Lithuania as Moses Vorobeichic, Moi Ver initially studied painting. In his early 20s he matriculated at the Bauhaus, taking courses with Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and Joseph Albers, and left from there to attend the Ecole Photo One in Paris. He adopted Zionism in 1934 and immigrated to what was then known as Palestine. Moshe Raviv-Vorobeichic (as he called himself in Palestine) died in 1995.