Robert Doisneau was a French photographer. His photography is considered unstaged and full of poetry and gentle humor, capable of revealing subtle personal emotions in a public environment.
Background
Robert Doisneau was born on April 14, 1912 in Gentilly, Ile-de-France, France, into the family of Gaston and Sylvie (Duval) Doisneau. Doisneau’s childhood wasn’t idyllic at all – his father died in a service in World War I when he was just four years old, while his mother passed away when he was seven. Young Robert was raised by an aunt he often used to describe as a rough and unloving person.
Education
At thirteen he enrolled at the École Estienne, a craft school from which he graduated in 1929 with diplomas in engraving and lithography. There he had his first contact with the arts, taking classes in figure drawing and still life.
When he was 16 he took up amateur photography but was reportedly so shy that he started by photographing cobble-stones before progressing to children and then adults.
At the end of the 1920s, Doisneau found work as a draughtsman (lettering artist) in the advertising industry at Atelier Ullmann (Ullmann Studio), a creative graphics studio that specialized in the pharmaceutical industry. Here he took an opportunity to change career by also acting as a camera assistant in the studio and then becoming a staff photographer.
By 1931, Doisneau abandoned his career as a lithographer because he felt that it wasn’t his true calling. Around the same period, he became an assistant to Andre Vigneau, a famous modernist photographer. Thanks to his practice in Vigneau’s studio, Doisneau started to develop his own photographic style and already in 1932 he sold his first photograph to the magazine Excelsior.
Two years later, in 1934, he became a photographer for prestigious Renault, but he got fired in 1939 for always being late. Despite his volatile past and sometimes unreliable personality, Doisneau was soon hired by the Rapho Photographic Agency. His assignments consisted of extensive traveling through his home country and looking for stories to photograph. It was during these years that he took his first street photographs which eventually became his signature style.
In 1940, Doisneau joined the French army, but he managed to stay in the photography business by producing various postcards. During the war, the artist has also used his photographic skills to forge passports for the French resistance. He stayed in the military until the very end of World War II in 1945. After the war, Doisneau has returned to full-time photography career and he started selling pictures to many magazines, including Life. In 1946, he rejoined the Rapho Photographic Agency and won the important Kodak Prize in 1947.
Robert Doisneau took his most famous photograph in 1950 – the image called "Le Baiser de l’hôtel de Ville" or "The Kiss" shows a young couple kissing in the busy Parisian streets. The identity of this couple remained unknown until 1992 when Jean and Denise Lavergne erroneously recognized themselves to be the couple in the photograph. They took Doisneau to court for taking the picture without their permission, but because of such abrupt course of events, Doisneau had to reveal that the people in the famous photograph were Françoise Delbart and Jacques Carteaud, both aspiring actors in their early twenties. The young couple has stated that Doisneau was extremely polite and that he asked if they could kiss for the camera.
This iconic photograph took place by the Hôtel de Ville and it got published in the issue of Life, in June 1950. When it comes to young actors, their relationship has lasted less than a year. Delbart continued her acting career while Carteaud became a winemaker. In 1950, Françoise Delbart was given an original print of this photograph, which she sold at auction for €155,000, to an unidentified collector from Switzerland.
By the late 50s, Doisneau has already achieved a lot of fame and recognition. In 1956, he won the Niépce Prize, while in 1983 he was awarded the Grand Prix National de la Photographie. A couple of years later the artist has won another prestigious award – the Balzac Prize. The 1950s were certainly Doisneau’s peak, but the 60s and the 70s were the eras of visual experimentation for many photographers. In the 1970s, magazine editors started looking for a new photo-reportage style that would represent a new social era. The old-style black and white documentary pictures weren’t popular anymore and magazines needed something innovative in order to maintain the public attention.
During his long and successful career, Doisneau has held many solo and group exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville in Paris, France, and at the Isetan Museum of Art in Tokyo, Japan. He also had many retrospectives at distinguished institutions, including the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the Art Institute of Chicago, George Eastman House in Rochester, and the Witkin Gallery in New York.
Doisneau’s unusual career is the subject of two short films – these are "Le Paris de Robert Doisneau", made in 1973, and "Bonjour Monsieur Doisneau", made in 1992 by the French actress and producer Sabine Azema. In 1991, the Royal Photographic Society awarded the artist an Honorary Fellowship, which is a special award given only to the most distinguished creators working in the realm of science or fine arts. It is also important to mention that Doisneau’s photography has gone through a certain revival since the artist’s death. His portraits and photographs dating back to the end of World War II have been transformed into calendars and postcards, which became icons of French contemporary culture.
Doisneau continued to work for magazines, but he started producing children’s books, advertising color photography and stunning celebrity portraits of Jean Cocteau, Fernand Léger, and Pablo Picasso. Around the same time, he started collaborating with famous poets such as Blaise Cendrars and Jacques Prévert. Robert Doisneau has even publicly appreciated Prévert and his poetry by saying that the poet has given him the confidence and inspiration to photograph everyday street scenes in Paris. Doisneau’s daughter Annette was also an important factor when it comes to his later career – from 1979 until her father’s death, Annette has worked as his personal assistant.
The artist passed away in 1994, after having had a heart bypass and acute pancreatitis.
Cesar Baldaccini (The Sculptor Cesar in his Workshop)
Georges Braque a Varengeville
photography
photography
photography
photography
photography
Views
Robert photographed a vast array of people and events, often juxtaposing conformist and maverick elements in images marked by an exquisite sense of humor, by anti-establishment values, and, above all, by his deeply felt humanism.
Quotations:
"The marvels of daily life are so exciting; no movie director can arrange the unexpected that you find in the street."
"Maybe if I were 20, success would change me. But now I’m a dinosaur of photography."
Membership
Le Groupe des XV was established in 1946 in Paris to promote photography as art and drawing attention to the preservation of French photographic heritage. Doisneau joined the Group in 1950 and participated alongside Rene-Jacques, Willy Ronis, and Pierre Jahan.
Personality
The artist was known as a real artisan photographer who was dedicated to his passion simply because it was his vocation, something he was exceptionally good at. He chastised Francine for charging an "indecent" daily fee of £2,000 for his work on a beer advertising campaign – he wanted only the rate of an "artisan photographer".
He wasn’t really goal-oriented and his slightly negligent behavior used to give headaches to some of his formal employers.
Doisneau was in many ways a shy and humble man, similar to his photography, still delivering his own work at the height of his fame.
Interests
Artists
André Kertész, Eugène Atget, and Henri Cartier-Bresson
Connections
In 1936 Doisneau married Pierrette Chaumaison whom he had met in 1934 when she was cycling through a village where he was on holiday. They had two daughters, Annette and Francine. From 1979 until his death, Annette worked as his assistant. His wife died in 1993 suffering from Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease.