Doisneau, Robert (1912-94), French photographer. Born in Gentilly on the southern edge of Paris in 1912, Doisneau became a leading exponent of French humanist photography. He never moved away from the Parisian banlieue (suburbs), and famously turned down an invitation to join Magnum in 1947 because it would have meant considerable travel outside France, and more particularly Paris. He had also recently joined the Rapho agency and felt loyalty to its owner, Raymond Grosset.
The most Parisian of the humanists, Doisneau's work can be seen as a visual social history of the city, its people and culture, from the 1930s to the 1980s. He spent much of his life on projects that cover the life of its streets, the people and places that gave the city and its suburbs their identity. His pictures of lovers, children, and families are widely reproduced. Although widely known for a series of anecdotal, narrative pictures in which he used models to recreate a situation he had observed earlier—Un régard oblique, Le Baiser de l'Hôtel de Ville—his extraordinarily rich body of work was mainly produced ‘sur le vif’, plucked by chance from the stream of everyday life.
Many of his most famous photographs were self-commissions, the outcome of a long wait on a street corner, or a lengthy promenade through a series of locations which might prove productive. Doisneau preferred to describe himself as a pêcheur d'images (a ‘fisher’ of pictures) rather than to use the term commonly used for reportage photographers—chasseur d'images (picture hunter). The difference is significant. In order to make ‘my’ pictures, Doisneau said, ‘I had to “get wet”, to immerse myself in the life of the people whom I was photographing’. Such an approach yielded the most comprehensive and multifaceted self-portrait of his social class, the classe populaire, a self-portrait which also shows the photographer as a person woven into the fabric of his times.
Trained as an engraver, Doisneau took up photography in 1930-1 as the new technology of the small camera was emerging. With his precious Rolleiflex he fished the suburbs for images which expressed his rebelliousness towards authority and convention. A period as industrial and commercial photographer at Renault (1934-9) helped to define his political and social values, which were sorely tried during the Occupation, when he scratched a living as a photographer and forger for the Resistance. Typically, his pictures of the liberation of Paris emphasize its human, popular character.
The years 1945-60 were Doisneau's heyday. He produced books that are iconic works of French humanism, worked regularly as a photojournalist, notably for Vogue and Life, and enjoyed rich and creative friendships with writers, musicians, and artists. In the 1960s and 1970s he had to turn increasingly to industrial and commercial work, but continued his own almost obsessive documentation of social change in Paris. Rediscovered in the 1980s as the author of iconic images of the 1950s, but also as a gifted raconteur and writer, he had a final period of intense activity, especially as a portraitist, a role for which he possessed true genius.
— Peter Hamilton
Bibliography
- Hamilton, P., Robert Doisneau: A Photographer's Life (1995)
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