Robert Doisneau
Le Baiser de l'Hôtel de Ville/ The Kiss at City Hall
Offset Lithograph
23.75 x 31 inches
Private collection
Estimated for €20,000 EUR - €25,000 EUR in June 2011
Doisneau’s photo was not without controversy. Many years later, a couple, Jean and Denise Lavergne, stepped forward to pronounce themselves the lip-locked subjects. Doisneau took the couple to lunch, and not wanting to “shatter their dream,” he let them go on thinking they were indeed the young lovers. But lunch was not enough for the Lavergnes. They sued Doisneau for “taking their picture without their knowledge or consent”. Doisneau then revealed the truth behind his photo. It was staged. The lovers were not the Lavergnes, but rather Françoise Delbart (20) and Jacques Carteaud (23), a couple whom he had seen kissing earlier that morning, but had not initially photographed. Doisneau approached them and asked if they would repeat le baiser. Doisneau won the court case against the Lavergnes.
More on this photograph
Robert Doisneau was born April 14, 1912 in Gentilly, Val-de-Marne, Paris. He is one of France’s most noted photographers. During his long career, his poetic approach to street photography recorded French everyday life in often playful and surreal images. Always charmed by his subjects, he enjoyed finding amusing juxtapositions or oddities of human nature.
Doisneau initially studied engraving and lithography at the École Estienne in Paris. After his graduation in 1929, he started photographing professionally, first working for advertising photographer André Vigneau, in whose studio he met artists and writers with avant-garde ideas. He began photographing details of objects in 1930, and sold his first photo-story to the Excelsior newspaper in 1932. Beginning in 1934, he worked for Renault as an industrial and advertising photographer. When he was fired in 1939, he earned his living through advertising and postcard photography. That year he was hired by the Rapho photo agency, where he worked until the onset of World War II. A member of the Resistance both as a soldier and as a photographer, Doisneau also worked for the resistance forging documents. He photographed both the occupation and the liberation of Paris. In 1945 he started anew with his advertising and magazine work, including fashion photography and reportage for French Vogue from 1948 to 1952.
His first book of photographs, La Banlieue de Paris (“The Suburbs of Paris,”1949); was followed by over twenty publications of his photographs, often of Paris and Parisians. In the 1950s Doisneau became active in Group XV, an organization of photographers devoted to improving both the artistry and technical aspects of photography.
He photographed a vast span 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. Doisneau was in many ways a shy and unassuming man, rather like his photography. He lived in the Paris suburb of Montrouge. He died on April 1, 1994 in Broussais, France.
More on Robert Doisneau
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