With permission of the one who captured Alfred Eisenstaedt Victory Day in Times Square and that went around the world from the pages of ‘Life’ magazine, few more famous kisses than the one that immortalized Robert Doisneau in 1950 Paris. A post-war icon and one of the best-selling posters in the world.
Over the years it was discovered that the photograph, apparently an outburst of passion in front of the City Hall of the French capital, was actually a mounting and that Doisneau had hired a couple of actors to stage that famous kiss. The commotion, of course, was considerable. So much so that the matter led to a judicial skirmish and ended up souring the last years of the life of the great portrait painter of post-war Paris.
«Paris is a theater in which the seat is paid with the time lost. I stand there with my little rectangle and wait”, the photographer liked to say. Jazz clubs and dancers. Musicians in the rain and couples having an aperitif. The bohemia of the city of Light and abandoned children that, he said, “people adopt and laugh in their heads.”
Doisneau fired more than 45,000 snapshots, but a kiss was enough, just one, to eclipse the work of a lifetime. So, you can imagine, the Frenchman was never too fond of that historic photograph. “The trial crushed him,” one of his daughters acknowledged years ago. “Besides, he never really liked the photo,” she added. «I would never have dared to photograph people like that. Lovers who kiss in the street, these couples are rarely legitimate,” Doisneau himself said.
time rediscovered
More than seven decades after that, the ‘curse’ of ‘The kiss of the hotel de Ville’ he continues to accompany Doisneau wherever he goes. Also to the Foto Nostrum gallery, where until March 5 you can see the first monographic exhibition dedicated to French in Barcelona. “The exhibition illustrates many of the themes that Doisneau dealt with in his career, including snapshots of children playing in the street and portraits of some of the brightest minds of the time,” explains Julio Hirsch-Hardy, director of Foto Nostrum. .
It is not missing, because it cannot do it, the legendary kiss, but there is much more. Specific, half a hundred of photographs taken between 1934 and 1971; vintage prints courtesy of Atelier Robert Doisneau showing “scenes of unknown characters in public space through a romantic perspective, juxtaposing the ordinary with humor and wit and finding beauty in the routine of everyday life.”
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ON THE STREETS OF PARIS
«Paris is a theater in which the seat is paid with the time lost. I stand there with my little rectangle and wait,” Doisneau said. On these lines, ‘Le Baiser de l’Hôtel de ville’, Paris, 1950; ‘Timide à lunettes’, Paris, 1956; and ‘Les pieds au mur’, Paris, 1934
Shy and reserved, Doisneau began working as an industrial photographer in the Renault offices, forged documents for the Resistance and photographed the liberation of Paris in 1944. “His work as a war photographer is often forgotten, with a body of work that lives up to from Cartier-Bresson or Robert Capa”, Hirsch-Hardy points out.
All in all, the selection that can be seen in Barcelona highlights his urban photography and portraits as famous as those he took of the filmmaker Jacques Tati in 1940 or that of Pablo Picasso with fingers of bread in 1952. “The photographer’s sense of humor has been prioritized and that is why the photographs that Doisneau took during the liberation and the end of the Nazi occupation are not included,” they emphasize from Foto Nostrum.
The great protagonist of ‘Recovered time’, however, it is the ‘immortal soul’ of Paris; the corners of the city, the gargoyles of Notre-Damme and the children jumping on the asphalt. Once again the theater where you can sit and wait with a Rolleiflex on your lap. «I am a clandestine hunter of the ephemeral», that aseguraba Doisneau.
In Barcelona, the Doisneau retrospective shares the spotlight with an exhibition dedicated to Joan Alsina, a fashion photographer whose latest work, ‘Textures’, is intended to be a tribute to Tàpies, Brossa, Pollock, Freud and Francis Bacon.