The much-loved Doisneau was torn between raw street photography and the desire to make his subjects look beautiful
By N.S. | BERLIN
THE first photo Robert Doisneau (1912-1994) ever shot was a pile of cobblestones, in 1928, when the French photographer was just 16. Such was the humble beginning of a “humanist photographer”: one who initially preferred to shoot objects because he was too shy to shoot people.
That changed over the course of his 50-year career, but some constants remained. One hundred of Doisneau’s black and white photographs from the 1940s and 1950s are now on display at Berlin’s Martin-Gropius-Bau museum, taken as he explored the cobblestoned streets of Paris and its surrounding suburbs during the brief post-war Fourth Republic. The exhibition largely consists of street scenes, buildings and Parisian nightlife.
Doisneau is often grouped with 20th-century humanists behind the camera, like Brassaï and Edouard Boubat, who documented everyday European life as people struggled to recover their lives after the second world war. It wasn’t photojournalism, but it represented freedom to photographers. Doisneau felt that daily life was the most exciting of all: “no movie director can arrange the unexpected that you find in the street.”
Yet Doisneau did, to some extent, direct. He is most famous for “Le baiser de l’hôtel de ville” (Kiss by the Town Hall, 1950, pictured top). Having seen a couple kissing—he had been too slow and shy to grab his camera as they did it—he asked them to do so again several times, eventually capturing a moment full of unrestrained happiness that was, paradoxically, stage-managed. The image was widely used to promote Paris as “the city of love”, even though Doisneau never wanted to be known as a romantic photographer. To this day, it is widely reproduced on postcards and calendars.
“From Craft to Art” does not dwell overly on this picturesque side of Paris, but also reveals the city’s melancholic possibilities. Many were living in misery at the end of the war—jobs were few, and food remained rationed (two slices of bread were allowed per person per day until 1948). The city’s factories, bombed during the war, still sat in rubble. Population growth outpaced the rate of building, causing a housing crisis. Crowded living quarters gave rise to tuberculosis. Doisneau chose to shoot such dark moments, capturing travellers in the metro during a bomb scare in 1944, coal pickers in Saint-Denis hunched before the River Seine and a baby wrapped in dirty blankets. He documented a Paris that had lost its bourgeois flair.
Doisneau was a slow, deliberate photographer, not a hunter. He preferred to capture impersonal cityscapes from high vantage points, and the streets of Paris when drenched in rain, fog or snow. As a result, some of his photos lack an emotional punch. By shooting groups of people from afar, perhaps he sought to show togetherness after so much conflict. He was bored by the countryside, preferring the business of city, and seemed to crave the idea of friends coming together in dark times. But distance between photographer and subject translates to distance between viewer and subject.
While Doisneau is sometimes compared to Henri Cartier-Bresson, the latter was the archetypal 20th-century street photographer and photojournalist, never shying away from the gritty or the troubling, even as he made beautiful images. Doisneau, unlike the upper-crust Cartier-Bresson, was from a middle-class suburb, documenting “the ordinary gestures of ordinary people in ordinary situations”, while making sure never to strip them of their dignity. He got close, but not too close. His pictures do not always elicit strong emotion, or much pain. While many are melancholic, few are heart-wrenching.
Doisneau’s talent really shone in the commissioned work he did for magazines, which was energetic and full of life. He had an appreciation for oddball creativity, shooting freak show circus acts, burlesque dancers and waltzing couples on Bastille Day. He shot Pablo Picasso seated at a kitchen table in a striped shirt, the only portrait in the show where the subject is looking directly into the lens. It’s a comical shot of the artist, even with his deadpan stare, as there are baguettes on the table where his hands should be.
Maybe Doisneau never overcame his fear of getting close to people, at least from behind the lens. In an interview from 1982, he said the camera gave him courage when he was afraid of going into unfamiliar places, such as nightclubs (“I was not afraid, because I had my camera with me, just like the helmet for a fireman,” he said). But once he shot what he considered to be a good photo, he knew it: he would get shivers down his back, and then run away.
