Tianducheng sits on the edge of Hangzhou, a residential district built in the image of Paris: an Eiffel Tower of its own, and a reported thirty-one square kilometres of façades, fountains and landscaping borrowed from the French capital. François Prost, a Parisian photographer, travelled there to photograph it — and then went back and photographed the Paris it was copied from.

Paris, China sets the two cities against each other. Landmarks appear as pairs, near-identical in form and oddly mismatched in atmosphere, and the book’s argument is carried by that rhythm of comparison rather than by any single picture. It is a game of spot-the-difference that never quite resolves, and the humour in it has an edge: what does it mean to build a city out of someone else’s memory, and who exactly is being flattered?

Prost works as a graphic designer and art director alongside his own photography, and his personal projects tend to treat the built environment as a system of signs — the façades of French nightclubs, machine-gun shops in the United States, Chinese scooters. The replication of European architecture in China is his subject here, and the pairing of original and copy is the device that makes it legible. Since then he has extended the same question to Venice and its doubles in Las Vegas and Hangzhou.

The book appeared in 2020 from Hoxton Mini Press as a compact paperback of 96 pages. Its scale is deliberate: paired plates read as an album of comparisons, and the sequence, not the individual frame, does the work. For a collection that follows conceptual documentary, the photography of architectural imitation, or the widening course of Prost’s project, it is a tight, coherent instance of a book whose structure is its argument.

What makes it worth returning to is not novelty of subject alone but the discipline of the editing. Each pairing asks the viewer to hold two places at once, and the small format keeps that operation close and repeatable.