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Search - Robert Doisneau: A Photographer's Life

Robert Doisneau A Photographer's Life
Author: Peter Hamilton

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)-Do... more »isneau 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 Drawing not only upon Doisneau's previously unpublished archives but also on conversations with the photographer in his final years, this book examines every aspect of Doisneau's work, including the techniques he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

ISBN-13: 9780789200204
ISBN-10: 0789200201
Publication Date: 9/1995
Pages: 384
Rating:

0 stars, based on 0 rating

Publisher: Abbeville Press
Book Type: Hardcover
Members Wishing: 0
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