This afternoon, strolling through the rooms containing the minimalistic, white-framed shots taken by a Robert Doisneau during his long career spanning fifty years, from the end of the Second World War to mid-nineties, I could not help but feel a pang of envy. I suppose that envy was directed both at his ability to witness Paris, whose Kafkaesque metamorphosis I had arrived too late to see first-hand, and also his capacity to capture it so intimately, as a woman not yet out of bed.
Paris and Robert Doisneau
© Atelier Robert Doisneau
Paris was undeniably the city which he loved, in writer’s jardgon “beyond words” and which – by the time I had arrived there ten years after he passed – had irrevocably changed, all while staying loyal to its supermodel feel. The photographs of his first retrospective in Rome are a testimony of the evolution of Paris in its own might, and perhaps more interestingly, in its bond with its inhabitants.
Robert Doisneau’s glances at that Paris d’autrefois of the fifties and sixties – a city of shopkeepers chatting in front of their bottegas, of unattended children liberally roaming the streets, and of suspicious-looking concierges – are indeed a homage to a reality that has since disintegrated as ice with global warming. Paris has changed, the photographer seems imply, not by virtue of aging, but rather from being re-imagined without remaining authentic to its original structure.
The exhibition in Rome
A hundred and forty photographs stare at me, each one with at least one pair of eyes. A face of a boy innocently strolling through the mud in 1945. Workers moving the Maillol statue at the Jardin des Tuileries in 1954. But also. Jacques Pervert in front of café Mérode in 1955. Alberto Giacometti in his atelier in 1957. Georges Braques eying the camera with a mixture of frankness and reticence in 1953. Among his shots, there are ironically almost no photos of his beloved the city itself.
The pinnacle of the exposition, as highlighted by the advertisement on the façade of the museum, is the kiss of a couple in front of Hotel de Ville (Le Baiser de l’Hôtel de Ville) Doisneau took as part of his reportage on Parisian lovers for Life Magazine. Despite the legal dispute around the rights of its subjects that erupted forty years after the photo was taken, this very image had for decades been a poster of that Paris d’autrefois, of “once upon a time” city.
The quintessence of love
After attacks on Bataclan, this very photo had re-emerged as a testimony of the city’s resistance, first appearing on a building on the nearby Boulevard Richard Lenoir, before flooding social media. Eying the passionately embracing couple I still wondered if Doisneau would have selected this photograph, without a doubt his most famous, to represent his work. Certainly, they a certain obviousness to their surroundings, which was clearly his leitmotif.
The photographer himself admits: “These two people cared very little about the fact that the Hotel de Ville of Paris, burned in 1871, had been rebut by Ballu and Deperthes in 1874.” And yet, if indeed this was Doisneau’s fundamental theme, that couple was certainly not alone. The image of man on a bicycle leaning in to steal a kiss from a woman sitting inside a wooden box wedged on it, as impromptu as comical, has the same feel and a less staged effect.
This photo, the protagonists of which we do not and will probably never know, immaculately captured what appeared for Doisneau the quintessence of love: the ability to momentarily exist in some detached microcosm immense as a planet. Had I been given the choice, I may have picked it as the poster of the exhibit, draped over the museum entrance on Lungotevere della Vittoria.
The old Paris, a city where the air had not gravity
© Atelier Robert Doisneau
In the lightness he captures in these couple moments – some staged, others noticed – parallels can be drawn to the work of his compatriot Agnés Varda on display at Villa Medicis. Both his and Varda’s work is a testimony to a certain weightlessness of life in that Paris, as if the city’s air had no density, as if there were no rules of gravity, as if the divisiveness that would later dominate it was still entirely unfathomable.
That weightlessness permeates not only the romantic gestures Doisneau captured, but equally, the routine scenes of blue-collar Paris. Indeed, his work seems to eradicate the bridges that at the time connected the working class rive droit to the bourgeois rive gauche, bridges that have since been ironically erased in an entirely different way by the gentrification of the city that rendered both banks unaffordable to most.
Even when he captured artists – apart perhaps from the eccentric Picasso standing defiantly wrapped in silk mantle – the energy they emanated was that artisans rather than celebrities, as if through the lens of his discreet Rolleiflex camera, he was attempting to erase all notion of social class. His choice of black-and-white – which the photographer confessed was in fact an economic one – certainly “aided and abated” him in that quest.
The emergence of colour photographs
The emergence of colour photographs half-way through the exhibit, that, contrary of his earlier images are all devoid of eyes, is surprising to the point of being unsettling. However, to underestimate these photos due to their absence of protagonists would be a mistake. Doisneau’s interest in Paris’ banlieues, was to emphasize their inhumanness and perhaps to explain their inability to foster a community, to melt into the city he so loved.
The metamorphosis of Paris captured by Robert Doisneau
© Atelier Robert Doisneau
The metamorphosis of the city that he started to capture in black-and-white the fifties to that we see in colour in the nineties, uncomfortably recalls my inability to synch with the pulse of the city I inhabited for fifteen years – a city where frustrated immigrants meet the misapprehension of the elites. Only on Rue de Richelieu, where I last lived, I did not directly feel this dividedness prying open the city’s guts wide as the Grand Canyon.
I feel no longing for Paris whose streets I walked for some many years, unable despite my best efforts to fall in love with its streets and, perhaps most of all, its attitude. And yet, Doisneau’s work on the city he started to immortalise in the fifties, up until an epoch that ironically ended about the time I was born in the eighties, could make me change my mind. This feeling of missing something one has never lived reminds me of the state that André Aciman has called the “irrealis mood”.
André Aciman, irrealis mood
“Mine is not simply a longing for the past”, he writes about his exploration of perception of his memory growing up as a child. “It is a longing for a time in the past when I wasn’t just projecting onto Europe an imaginary future; what I long for is the memory of those last days in Alexandria when I was already anticipating looking back from Europe on the very Alexandria that I couldn’t wait to lose. I long for myself looking out to the self I am today.”
The joie de vivre captured in Doisneau’s work encourages the type of longing that Aciman speaks of for a city that was ultimately also his final destination, after Jews’ expulsion from Egypt. It was a longing for a city in an epoch in which he did, but I had never had the chance to experience. Perhaps it is within that “joy of existence” – an admittedly poor translation of that French expression – that the photographer’s undeniable adoration of Paris resided.
Doisneau: the love for one city and one woman in an entire life
© Atelier Robert Doisneau
On the other hand, Doisneau does not attempt to hide that whatever existed outside Paris had never been of much interest to him. His love with one city – as was with a woman with whom he had shared his life for almost fifty years, surviving her by a mere six months – appears to have made him indifferent to the rest. Some of his foreign reportages such as from Siberia never saw the light of day, while others from Palm Springs did not make it to the retrospective.
By the last room, it dawned on me that Paris was not Doisneau’s stage, but rather his protagonist. The exhibit’s curator appears to have also zoomed in on this, remarking that “the streets, neighbourhoods, suburbs, and urban spaces become the state for a lifelong inquiry, revealing the complexity of everyday life through the simplest and most authentic gestures.”
Robert Doisneau and Paolo Sorrentino: Paris and Naples
As I walk out to face the sunset of the city about which I feel the same as he did about Paris, I cannot help but think of the similarity – not in terms of the means, but rather in terms of the premise – of the work of Robert Doisneau and Paolo Sorrentino, for whom Naples is also not only a stage, but an ageless protagonist.
There is another striking similarity in the work of the two men. When at a recent screening I attended, a spectator had questioned Sorrentino about his message in Parthenope, he wryly offered that his movies do not contain answers, only questions. Doisneau also confesses that “the photographs that interest me and that I consider successful are those that never quite reach a conclusion, that do not tell a story all the way through, but remain open…”
Perhaps this very admission underpins his ethos as a “humanist photographer”, a label that – when initially suggested live on French television – had him laughing, and yet one that has stuck through the years. As I glance at the façade of Museo del Genio, the irony of its fascist architecture containing those Parisian faces recovering after the World War hits hard. Edit Piaf’s voice, which echoed in every room of the exhibit as Celine Dion’s voice in the stalls of all Canadian supermarkets, finally recedes in the background, allowing the images alone to float in my mind.
https://www.arthemisia.it/it/mostra-robert-doisneau-roma-informazioni/
Alissa Kole is a writer, poet director and speaker published in financial and literary press.
