The Eiffel Tower, published by 5 Continents Editions in 2005, treats Paris’s most familiar landmark as a subject of construction, photographic record, and urban change. Written by Joëlle Bolloch, the book draws on photographs from the Musée d’Orsay collection documenting the tower’s construction between 1887 and 1889. Its focus is therefore not the monument as a finished tourist emblem, but the processes, structures, and historical moment that brought it into being.

That premise gives the book a particular documentary and architectural character. The images follow the emergence of the tower as an engineering project while also registering the Parisian skyline around it. Seen in this context, the Eiffel Tower is neither isolated spectacle nor timeless symbol: it is a constructed object, photographed within a city undergoing visible transformation. The collection’s historical distance allows familiar forms—ironwork, incomplete sections, elevated views, and surrounding streets—to be read as evidence as much as imagery.

For collectors of photographic books, the volume is notable for the way it joins an institutional image archive to a concise historical study. The photographs are presented as a collective record rather than as the work of a single credited photographer, and that distinction matters: the book’s authorship lies in its selection, context, and editorial framing. At 96 pages, in a 16 × 16 cm softcover English edition, it offers a compact encounter with a major subject in the history of modern Paris and photography. Its interest rests in this disciplined shift of attention—from the icon everyone recognizes to the material history that photography makes visible.