Robert Doisneau: A Photographer's Life covers the renowned work of the French photographer famous for the 1950 picture Le Baiser de le Hotel de Ville ("Kiss at the Hotel"). This frequently reproduced portrait of an attractive couple frozen in an embrace while Parisian city life whirls around them is an archetypal emblem of romance. It's pretty surprising to learn that Doisneau hired young actors for his entire kissing series; nevertheless, the moment rings undeniably true. Maybe it's his beginnings in advertising or his fashion work for Vogue that lend his images equal parts of real life and theater.

Doisneau (1912-1994) spent his lifetime recording life in France. With his combination of photojournalism and art, he captured nightclubs, the Parisian working-class suburbs, national monuments, weddings, and famous folk like Picasso. Some of the most riveting pictures are of resistance fighters in the midst of the Occupation--young men in civilian clothes, sportcoats and all, standing with guns behind homemade barricades. Accompanying the hundreds of pictures are in-depth chapters that discuss the different periods in Doisneau's life and work. From his childhood, through the war, and on to his fascination with the banlieues (suburbs), the well-researched text gives invaluable insight into this influential photographer's practice. --J.P.Cohen


From Library Journal
In this first authorized biography of the French photographer Robert Doisneau (1912-94), many of his photographs are reproduced for the first time. Doisneau didn't like to travel; he found his images mostly in his own "backyard," the banlieu that defines the nearby outskirts and suburbs of Paris, especially Montrouge, where he lived with his wife of over 60 years (she died six months before him) until his death in April 1994. His two children assisted the author with this work. Photography was Doisneau's effort toward immortality, "the refusal to entirely disappear." Waiting for just the right moment, he recorded thousands of ordinary people doing ordinary and extraordinary things in the course of their day-to-day lives. Doisneau explained his motivations: "And it's better, isn't it, to shed some light on those people who are never in the limelight?" Hamilton (Doisneau: Retrospecive, St. Martin's Pr., 1993) traces modernist influences on Doisneau, notably the illustrated magazines, like Vu, Regards, and Match, that popularized "humanist" photography, and includes a chapter on technique. This important book, with its excellent reproductions, should be added to all photography collections.?Kathleen Collins, New York Transit Museum Archives, BrooklynCopyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Quintessentially French, photographer Robert Doisneau (1912^-94) spoke no other language and never photographed outside France's borders. Considering himself a latter-day Atget possessed of a far finer sense of humor, he roamed the streets of Paris and its working-class suburbs, looking for the amusing or simply human moments that he loved. His most famous picture, showing a young couple kissing on the street, contains the sum of his interests in pleasure, the city, and common human emotion. Communist in his sympathies, Doisneau was never overtly political in his work; indeed, he began his career working for the industrial giant, Renault. He soon went freelance and highly prized the freedom to go his own way. He never had or wanted a specialty, yet most of his best work is social documentary concentrating on the ordinary French. He also did fashion photography and portraits and even produced children's books, using his own daughters as models. Hamilton's lengthy, copiously illustrated, authorized biography affords an impressively complete look at the life of a warm, delightful mid-century photographer. Gretchen Garner


The Picture Professional, Issue 2, 1998
This is a terrific example of how a biography of a photographer should be presented.


Book Description
The first authorized biography available, Robert Doisneau provides an intimate and rich account of the life of the French photographer who captured the streets and elusive spaces of Paris as the city entered the modern era. Perhaps best known as the creator of romantic images of Paris-particularly The Kiss (Le Baiser de l'Hôtel de Ville)-Doisneau is, in fact, a key figure in the history of documentary photography. His passion was to notice and record the ordinary life around him, presented by chance, "like a bouquet." He photographed everything from local weddings to heads of states, from a homeless drunk asleep over a subway grate to a masked ball in a Venetian palace, recording the marginal and transitory zones recognized by Charles Baudelaire and later by Walter Benjamin as the symbolic, shifting landscapes of modern life. Drawing not only upon Doisneau's previously unpublished archives but also on conversations with the photographer in his final years, this book examines every aspect of Doisneau's work, including the techniques he used. Emphasized are his periods of engagement with the birth of photojournalism in the 1930s; with humanist social realism in the 1940s and 1950s; and with montage and art brut in the 1960s. The photographs, made by Doisneau on his own and while working for Vogue, Life, and other well-known magazines, reveal how the familiar is swept away, a theme germane to city-dwellers everywhere. Peter Hamilton portrays Doisneau's "telescopic" life as a series of vignettes, fortuitous encounters, and friendships with a cast of larger-than-life characters, including Blaise Cendrars, Fernand Léger, Jacques Prévert, and Robert Giraud. Doisneau grew up at the edge of the Parisian banlieue, a zone between town and country to which he continually returned in order to capture the life of a place where, as he said, "you went either to play, to make love, or to commit suicide." He came of age along with his profession, and Hamilton not only details this social history but in a personal and resonant style includes Doisneau's own voice, chronicling his developing perception of his life's work as a collection of images that constitute "a surrealist project," "a little theater" of the worlds he passed through. Illustrated with more than four hundred photographs in duotone, many published for the first time, Robert Doisneau: A Photographer's Life resembles what Doisneau loved most, "the flower that grows between the railway tracks, infinitely more interesting than flowers in vases." 500 duotne and 20 full-color illustrations 368 pages 9 1/2 x 9 1/2" Trade Cloth


From the Publisher
The definitive volume on the life and work of Robert Doisneau, the French photographer who captured the mood and character of Paris as the city entered the modern age.


About the Author
Peter Hamilton, who lives in Oxford, England, is a sociologist and occasional photographer. He frequently writes on photography for magazines and newspapers, including The Sunday Times and The British Journal of Photography. In 1992 he curated a major Doisneau retrospective for the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The first authorized biography available, Robert Doisneau provides an intimate rich account of the life of the French photographer who captured the streets and elusive spaces of Paris as the city entered the modern era. Drawing not only upon Doisneau's previously unpublished archives but also on conversations with the photographer in his final years, this book examines every aspect of Doisneau's work, including the techniques he used. Emphasized are his periods of engagement with the birth of photojournalism in the 1930s; with humanist social realism in the 1940s and 1950s; and with montage and art brut in the 1960s. The photographs, made by Doisneau on his own and while working for Vogue, Life, and other well-known magazines, reveal how the familiar is swept away, a theme germane to city-dwellers everywhere.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal

In this first authorized biography of the French photographer Robert Doisneau (1912-94), many of his photographs are reproduced for the first time. Doisneau didn't like to travel; he found his images mostly in his own "backyard," the banlieu that defines the nearby outskirts and suburbs of Paris, especially Montrouge, where he lived with his wife of over 60 years (she died six months before him) until his death in April 1994. His two children assisted the author with this work. Photography was Doisneau's effort toward immortality, "the refusal to entirely disappear." Waiting for just the right moment, he recorded thousands of ordinary people doing ordinary and extraordinary things in the course of their day-to-day lives. Doisneau explained his motivations: "And it's better, isn't it, to shed some light on those people who are never in the limelight?" Hamilton (Doisneau: Retrospecive, St. Martin's Pr., 1993) traces modernist influences on Doisneau, notably the illustrated magazines, like Vu, Regards, and Match, that popularized "humanist" photography, and includes a chapter on technique. This important book, with its excellent reproductions, should be added to all photography collections.-Kathleen Collins, New York Transit Museum Archives, Brooklyn

BookList - Gretchen Garner