"Paris, mon amour!" Robert Doisneau portrays the metropolis

To coincide with the Olympics, a wonderful, large-format photo book celebrates the photographer Robert Doisneau and his favorite model: Paris!

Everyone probably knows "Le baiser" - the kiss in front of the town hall, but many are less familiar with the author. Yet Doisneau is one of the most popular photographers in France, and countless of his pictures have made history. The sometimes assumed lightness, even banality of the motifs proves to be a mistake on closer inspection; here is a subtle artist at work. The large picture format and the chronological collection of 440 pages also reveal the work behind the "chance hits" and that the lucky snapshot sometimes only came after hours of waiting.

In his autobiography, Doisneau, who was born in 1912, writes that he grew up with a wooden camera. In fact, he initially lugged around a huge wooden 18×24 camera, complete with glass negatives, cover cloth and tripod - much like his great role model Eugene Atget. His first shot shows a pile of cobblestones, and the skillful lighting is fascinating. He soon switched to the Rolleiflex, the most important two-lens 6×6 camera at the time. The bent view into the light shaft viewfinder suited his shyness, and for a long time he was afraid of photographing people. But fortunately this changed, his portraits of celebrities and strangers are legendary: Pablo Picasso with the famous bread roll hands, Tati with the totally dismantled bicycle, Braque, Utrillo, Francoise Sagan, Isabelle Huppert, the very young Bardot and of course his favorites Blaise Cendrars and above all Jacques Prévert ...

But it is precisely his everyday Parisian scenes that have rightly made him famous. Snapshots of characters and figures, full of love and humor, without shyness, but without ever exposing the protagonists to ridicule. Workers, tradesmen, concierges, clochards, the actors of the "Halles", the fighters against the occupiers and the celebrators of liberation, high society parties and again and again children, whose spontaneity and directness were entirely in keeping with the "street photographer" (Doisneau). The result is a chronicle of a Paris that has disappeared, a chronicle that is very similar to Atget. But whether celebrities or street subjects - the self-proclaimed "picture thief" always seems to have snapped away with a quiet smile. The renowned French photography critic and historian Jean Claude Gautrand has made a clever selection from the 450,000 or so negatives and accompanied it with explanatory texts that underline Doisneau's special significance. A great opportunity to rediscover the photographer and Paris on this side of the Rhine.

Text: Herbert Lechner

Robert Doisneau: Paris
Edited by Jean Claude Gautrand, Taschen Verlag
Hardcover, 25 x 34 cm, 3.31 kg, 440 pages
ISBN 978-3-8365-9948-1
50,- Euro