Capturing the essential intimacy of a room left unguarded, photographer Dominique Nabokov documents the living rooms of well-known Parisians—artists, writers, designers, intellectuals, and the occasional celebrity. Decorating magazines always show interiors after a full-blown beauty treatment. Often, the spontaneity of those who live there is lost to an art director's exercise in style. Here, the opposite happens: These living room photographs are unaffected snapshots, portraits without gloss. The rooms vary widely from one another in terms of formality and decor, but they are all equalized under the gaze of Nabokov's camera. Each room is shot simply, as it happened to appear on that particular day. Nabokov does not use special lighting or allow the rooms to be arranged by a stylist. The result is a series of fascinatingly deadpan photos that puts an ironic slant on the celebrity interior genre. These peeks into the living rooms of celebrated Parisians will provide hours of voyeuristic pleasure.

Dominique Nabokov started out as an assistant to the photographer Patrick Demarchelier in 1980. She is the author/photographer of New York Living Rooms, and has contributed to numerous other books. Her photographs have appeared in such publications as The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Artforum, Vogue, Interview, and The New York Review of Books. Her work has been widely exhibited in France, Germany, and the United States. Andrée Putman (introduction) is one of the world's leading interior architects and designers. Working on space and light with special attention paid to the naturalness and elegance of details, she creates with her team of architects and designers timeless, simple, familiar, and thoroughly contemporary spaces.