A Frenchman invented the art of photography, and for more than one hundred and sixty years French photographers have made photography conform to a classic and distinctly French view of art. In the early years of photography’s development, French photographers like Daguerre and Nadar defined the look and aesthetic for photography as an art form. In fact, photography was one of the major influences on the impressionist school of art that developed in France at the end of the nineteenth century, creating an incredibly strong bond between photography and painting, less than fifty years after the first photograph was made in 1839.
The French continued to exert a strong influence on the development of photography as an art form and after World War I French photographers rejected the popular photographic aesthetic of Pictorialism and embraced the romance, humanity, and surrealism of dadaists like Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel. Photographers Man Ray, Braasai, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Willy Ronis, Izis, and Robert Doisneau (pronounced Dwahzs-no) challenged the staid traditionalism and complacency of the post war art world
Like their contemporaries in the cinema, music, literature, and painting this small group of photographic artists helped shape a completely new and exciting vision of the modern world. They embraced life on the streets of Paris, and made images of real people engaged in the daily task of living. They didn’t depict their world with disdain, nor did they photograph the poor with the lack of personal involvement, and shallow empathy that often characterized the documentary photography genre. Rather they shot the life of their city with the same sense of discovery and unadulterated “joie de vivre” that epitomizes the Parisian character. The beauty, surrealism, pain, and absurdity of daily life were depicted with an openness, spontaneous humor, and lack of guile that is still striking. In the process they invented the “street” photography genre, redefined documentary photography, and helped fashion the artistic aesthetic that would become the “Magnum” style of B&W photo-journalism that dominated news photography for more than thirty years. .
Robert Doisneau was born in the suburbs of Paris in 1912, and was originally trained as an engraver/lithographer, but in 1929 he embraced a new interest as a self-taught photographer. He regarded photography as the ideal artistic medium, allowing him to immediately record the images that sprang to life during his wanderings around Paris. He began his career as a professional photographer in 1934 shooting industrial and advertising images. In 1939 Doisneau joined the French army and in 1940 (after the fall of France) he worked for the French resistance using his engraving expertise and photographic skills to create false documents. He photographed the Nazi occupation of Paris, and some of his most striking images are of the young Parisian resistance fighters manning street barricades during the liberation of Paris.
After the war Doisneau shot for Life and other leading international news magazines. In 1949 he went to work for the French edition of the fashion magazine Vogue, where he was a full-time staff photographer until 1952. From 1953 on Doisneau worked as a freelance photographer. He documented life in the streets, cafes, and working class suburbs of Paris. His images quickly became icons of the French way of life, especially the life of Paris in the twentieth century. Doisneau’s romantic and humanistic images were often humorous, and always showed a deep sensitivity and enduring empathy for his subjects. The best known of these images is probably the 1950 picture Le Baiser de le Hotel de Ville ("The Kiss at the City Hall”) a photograph that made Doisneau famous. He loved his city and its inhabitants and worked throughout his life to create a body of work comprised of tiny moments frozen in time, a series of single instants “snatched from eternity”, in which his beloved city and the wonderful people that made it unique in the world came to life.
Doisneau was inspired by the work of French photographer Eugene Atget, but felt that it was missing much of the humor and pathos inherent in daily life. Doisneau also loved the images of Henri Cartier-Bresson and had a better understanding of the precise application of Cartier-Bressons concept of the “decisive moment” than any photographer other than Cartier-Bresson himself. Doisneau’s images were timed perfectly, created at the exact instant when the image exceeded the sum of its individual elements. Doisneau’s images often take the “decisive moment” equation one step further and add a subtle human empathy that is missing in the work of Cartier-Bresson, a spiritual and physical connection with his subjects that Cartier-Bresson was never able to achieve because of his wealth and stand-offish shyness. Doisneau was never the dispassionate observer with a camera; he was always a participant in the life that swirled about him.
For more than sixty years Doisneau photographed Paris and the Parisians, he spoke only French and rarely made a photograph outside of France. He chronicled the changes in his city as Paris moved into the twentieth century; from the exuberant days of Bohemian Paris between the wars, through the Nazi occupation. After the liberation of Paris, he documented the flamboyance of the fities when Paris was the world capitol of fashion, the violent political and social unrest of the sixties and seventies, and the surreal and theatrical economic, artistic, and cultural changes of the eighties, and early nineties.
Doisneau is best known as the creator of simultaneously naturalistic and surrealistic (equal parts real life, street theater, and the absurdity of the human condition) romantic images. With his highly developed sense of humor and a sharp eye for the absurd he captured sensitive and vibrant monochrome images of Parisian nightspots, national monuments and architectural treasures, the people of Paris, and the movers and shakers of the Parisian art world.
About the Photographer
“A hundredth of a second here, a hundredth of a second there - even if you put them end to end they still only add up to one, two, perhaps three seconds snatched from eternity.” *
In Doisneau's own words, he saw his life's work as a linear collection of images that constituted a short intense moment of surreal street theater. What Doisneau loved most, "the flower that grows between the railway tracks, infinitely more interesting than flowers in vases"** was the basis of his career as a photographer, a playful, sensitive, ironic and ultimately charming vision of human frailty and urban life as a series of small humorous candid moments. His artistic passion was to record the life around him, everything from a neighborhood wedding to a homeless drunk asleep over a subway grate. Doisneau's work is a comprehensive celebration and exploration of the life and culture of Paris, a definitive view of the world’s most romantic city.
Doisneau won the Prix Kodak in 1947, and the Prix Niepce in 1956. His work has been the subject of major retrospectives at the Bibliotecque Nationale in Paris, the Art Institute of Chicago, George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, the Witkin Gallery in New York City, and the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford. Robert Doisneau published several books of his images, the best known is “Three Seconds From Eternity”
About the Book
Throughout his life, Doisneau loved wandering the streets of Paris searching for the amusing, absurd, and sensitive human moments that fascinated him. Doisneau loved his city, the common people who populated the streets, and the emotion, romance, absurdity, and beauty displayed by those people in their everyday lives and their interactions with each other and their unique environment.
If every picture tells a story, then “street” photographer Robert Doisneau was a monumental teller of tales, and his photographs of Parisians at work, at war, at play, and in love are an enchanting and sensitive vision of the life in one of the world’s great cities. Robert Doisneau died in Paris in 1994.
About the author
Peter Hamilton lives in Oxford, England where he is a sociologist and occasional photographer. He writes on photography and photographers for magazines and newspapers, including The Sunday Times and The British Journal of Photography. In 1992 he curated a major Doisneau retrospective for the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford. Robert Doisneau: Retrospective is a record of that exhibit. The images cover the period from 1929 to 1992, and provide readers with a historical perspective of Doisneau’s career as a photographer.
Title: Robert Doisneau: Retrospective
Author: Peter Hamilton
Publisher: Cartago
Copyright: 2000 (ISBN: 1850435650)
Ppbk 128 pages 107 B&W Photographs
$30.00
If you’d like to see some of Robert Doisneau’s images follow the link below
Photo Gallery of Robert Doisneau
http://www.fortunecity.com/skyscraper/centre/615/art/doisneau.html
If you enjoyed reading this review, please check out my other photographic book
reviews:
“Haunter of Ruins” The Photography of Clarence John Laughlin
http://www.epinions.com/content_35055898244
“Live Steam” Paddlewheel Steamboats on the Mississippi System by John Kral
http://www.epinions.com/content_31470227076/tk_~CB005.1.7
“Not Fade Away” The Rock and Roll Photography of Jim Marshall
http://www.epinions.com/content_20411747972
Wynn Bullock “The Enchanted Landscape” Photographs 1940-1975
http://www.epinions.com/book-review-5DDB-80C8F3E-39DB828E-prod1
“Atkins—Girls Night Out” Chloe Atkins
http://www.epinions.com/content_28351106692/tk_~CB008.1.1
just “cut’n’paste” the URL into your browser’s address window
*Robert Doisneau
**Robert Doisneau
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