Perhaps to differentiate himself from his contemporary and friend Henry Cartier-Bresson, an "image hunter" who delved into reality in search of the decisive moment, Robert Doisneau (1912-1994) saw himself as a "fisherman", he sat somewhere, he cast the hook and expected things to happen. “Paris is a theater where you pay for a seat with wasted time. And I continue to wait, ”he said.
Indeed, with the Rolleiflex camera slung over his shoulder, he walked for years through Paris and its suburbs, where he was born, photographing astonished children playing on cobbled streets, newlyweds having an aperitif in a bistro, or dancers with their feet untied in a crowded club, finding in all of them reasons to marvel at. At his death he left 45,000 images, but one was enough for him, The Kiss of the Hôtel de Ville, to become the best-known photographer in France; also the reason for his worst nightmare.
The image of the young man with tousled hair who plants a kiss on the lips of his young lover, both completely oblivious to the noise that surrounds them, can now be contemplated, as if it were an object of worship, in a kind of small chapel where the exhibition Le temps retrouvé ends, with which the FotoNostrum center pays homage to one of the greatest representatives of humanist photography, whose empathy for the beings he photographed was always filtered by a refreshing sense of humor. The exhibition, carried out in collaboration with the Atelier Robert Doisneau, managed by the photographer's daughters, consists of fifty photographs, mostly vintage copies, that travel through different moments of his career, between 1934 and 1971.
The Kiss at the Hôtel de Ville belongs to a series carried out by Doisneau in 1950 commissioned by Life magazine. His goal was to show the world how, after the war, Paris was once again the capital of love. Thirty years later, due to the publication of a poster, the image became a true worldwide phenomenon, selling 460,000 copies. The reverse of the success came when a French magazine L'Express wondered on the cover what had become of those young people. A couple, who thought they recognized each other in the image, took Doisneau, who was 81 years old and retired, to trial in 1993.
They demanded compensation for having been captured without their consent. Doisneau was forced to reveal that the image had been staged, that he had seen the couple passionately kissing in a bar and had proposed to pose for him. “The photo was posed. But the kiss was real”, claimed Françoise Bornet, the protagonist of the image, who would later make a career as an actress. And Doisneau, throwing away the criticism of those who felt cheated, was blunt: “I would never have dared to photograph people like that. Lovers who kiss on the street, those couples are rarely legitimate."
His first photograph, in 1928, was a pile of cobblestones. A humble beginning for a teenager who preferred to photograph objects because he was too shy to shoot people. He then lived through two world wars; in the second he dedicated himself to forging identity documents for the Resistance, and photographing the occupation and liberation of Paris. “In the end, limitations are not a bad thing. My shyness prevented me from photographing people up close. For this reason, they were always enrolled in an environment, and that is something that I later tried to recover ”, he admitted. In the show there are also portraits of the poet Jacques Prévert, the actor Jacques Tati or a Picasso dressed in a striped T-shirt and sitting at the dining table pretending not to notice the bread in the shape of plump hands on both sides of his plate ( Picasso's rolls, 1952).
Le temps retrouvé (until March 5) shares the spotlight with a second exhibition, Textures, by Joan Alsina, with which FotoNostrum inaugurates a new line of programming in which it will combine the presentation of photography classics with Catalan photographers, according to its director, Julio Hirsch-Hardy.
Alsina, which has great international projection in the field of fashion, presents here a personal and complex work, forged over many years, in which he uses the camera as a painter and the skin, the human body, as canvases. The result, with the complicity of the EGM laboratories, are hybrid beings, half gods, half human beings, where the influence of Tàpies, Brossa, Bacon, Pollock or Lucian Freud can be recognized.
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