NEW YORK, NY.- Renowned documentary photographer Jean-Pierre Laffont has been a transplanted resident from Paris to New York City since 1965. Organized into three parts (The City Never Sleeps, The Movers and Shakers, and The Mean Streets), New York City Up and Down is an elegant, incisive, and unexpected review of forty years of his exploration.

Just as he examined the explosive, the calm, the social, the environment in his prize-winning book Photographer’s Paradise, Laffont has filled New York City Up and Down with the highs and lows of New York City life. Not a commentary on the high end versus the low end of lifestyles, it is instead a commentary on the ups and downs—culturally, politically, and visually—that have taken place in the city he loves so much over the past four decades.

This is a book not to be missed by anyone who has ever visited, would like to visit, lived in, or has any curiosity at all about the “real” New York City, as seen through the eyes of a true visionary.

Jean-Pierre Laffont attended the School of Graphic Art in Vevey, Switzerland, where he received his Master’s in Photography, prior to serving in the French Army during the Algerian War (for which he received an award for his humanitarian efforts). He is a founding member of the Gamma USA and Sygma Photo News agencies. For more than four decades, Laffont traveled the globe and created work that was published in the world's leading news magazines, including Figaro, London Sunday Times, Newsweek, Paris Match, Stern, and Time. Among the numerous awards Laffont has received are the Overseas Press Club of America's Madeline Dane Ross Award, the World Press Photo General Picture Award, University of Missouri's World Understanding Award, and an award from the New York Newspaper Guild. In 1996 he was honored with the National French Order of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres (a Knight in the National French Order of Arts and Letters). He resides in New York City with his wife and editor, Eliane.

Joan Juliet Buck is an American writer. She was the editor-in-chief of French Vogue from 1994 to 2001, the only American ever to have edited a French magazine. She writes for W Magazine and Harper's Bazaar and was contributing editor to Vogue and Vanity Fair for many years. The author of two novels, she released a memoir, The Price of Illusion, in March 2017. She lives in upstate New York.