browseRobert Doisneau
One of documentary photography’s greats, Doisneau’s life’s work was a narrative of Paris. “In Paris, I know the town. I always need a lot of time, I have to be very familiar with a place, to feel I am part of it... I am part of the setting. I know it. Everywhere. I know places where I can stop if I’m tired. I have a friend who is a printer, another who is a leather gilder, another who is a cabinet maker. I go to see them. I know that it is city life, but I like it. When I go off to another country, I begin looking and feeling like a tourist.”
Born in 1912, Doisneau initially trained as an engraver, but gradually turned towards photography and the inspiration of the streets that surrounded him. “Brassai’s pictures showed me that my need to be filled with wonder could find stimulation in the photographing of everyday life in Paris.” Before the war he tried to make a living as an industrial photographer for Renault, but the boredom got to him: “When I am asked to work on an advertising or commercial job I get so fed up with it after a very short time that I just explode. Automatically then I find my way back toward the street, toward liberty again.” He was sacked in 1939 for persistent lateness. During the war he used his printing and photographing knowledge to forge passports and other documents, also working as a photojournalist. Liberation gave him back the freedom of the streets and he used it.
“I do have convictions that are, if you like, political. My photos are not pictures that say, ‘Here is good and evil, right and wrong.’ If my work speaks, it does so by being a little less serious, a little less solemn, and by its lightness it helps people to live. I think that is a social role that isn’t negligible. I don’t say that it is important, but just that it isn’t negligible. I would rather help people through photography than produce symbolic images for propaganda purposes. I work more in everyday chronicles and with smallness.”
After Amber’s Murray Martin visited him in Paris, Side Gallery presented and toured the first major exhibition of Doisneau in this country in the early eighties. He died in 1994.