Doisneau

Kiss by the Hotel de Ville, 1950


A pretty French girl who sits next to me at work introduced me to Doisneau the other day. Ever since my mind has been a swirling haze of Black & White images. For Doisneau’s B&W photographs, which I take sneak peeks at every now and then on the Internet, are some of the best examples of street photography I’ve seen in my life.

Doisneau (pronounced ‘doh-uh-noh’), or Robert Doisneau, French photographer, 1912-1994, is best known for his images of Parisian street life. His B&W photographs include not just strangers in casual moments captured on the streets, but also celebrities in their most perfect moods. For instance, this photo of Pablo Picasso:


Picasso and the loaves, 1952

Word has it that, although Doisneau was trained in the fine arts in his teens, he was soon interested in photography and, apparently, started off as a professional photographer just before WW2. He worked for Renault, but got fired. He became an independent photojournalist, left it to join the army during WW2, and left it to join the French Resistance, earning money producing postcards. After the war he got his break with Vogue magazine.


Fox terrier on the Pont des Arts, 1953

According to his website,

Robert Doisneau, one of France’s most popular and prolific reportage photographers, is known for his modest, playful, and ironic images of amusing juxtapositions, mingling social classes, and eccentrics in contemporary Paris streets and cafes. Influenced by the work of Kertesz, Atget, and Cartier-Bresson, in over 20 books Doisneau has presented a charming vision of human frailty and life as a series of quiet, incongruous moments. He has written: “The marvels of daily life are exciting; no movie director can arrange the unexpected that you find in the street.”


Hell, 1952

To see Robert Doisneau’s work, please visit his website. Some amazing Doisneau photographs are also on display at Masters of Photography website (click on any image and scale it up to ‘full’).

Doisneau’s most famous photo, Kiss by the Hotel de Ville, Paris 1950 (shown here at the beginning of my post), was under a controversy as it was found to be a posed shot, and not a natural photograph as Doisneau had initially claimed it was. The photo was sold at an auction a couple of years ago at a huge price.

[Citation: Quote from Robert Doisneau’s website; text taken from ‘The Encyclopedia of Photography’ (1984). Doisneau images from Masters of Photography website.]