20thC; Doisneau Robert

Black and white photograph of group of people, including a married couple, in a Parisian bar.

Robert Doisneau trained as an engraver and lithographer in his early teens and at 17 was employed as a lettering artist at a Paris graphic studio which specialised in advertising work and had just started to use photography as an advertising medium. Doisneau took an interest in photography at this time and became the unofficial photographic assistant at the studio before moving on to be the assistant to the photographer André Vigneau. Doisneau undertook his military service from 1932 to 1934, after which he was able to find work as a photographer at the Renault car plant at Boulogne, producing images of the work-force at leisure as well as at work. The 1930s were a productive period for Doisneau, working for Renault and also taking photographs of life in the Parisian suburbs. Just before the 2nd World War he began to take commissions as a freelance reportage photographer. The development of this aspect of his career was temporarily halted by the war but he returned to it in 1946. Doisneau’s projects in post-war France were diverse. He continued photographing suburban Parisian life and also produced fashion and society photographs as well as book illustrations. His famous ‘Kiss’ sequence taken for Life magazine in 1950. From the late 1970s onwards Doisneau’s work received growing acclaim, due partly to the increasing respectability of photography and the commissioning of work from Doisneau funded by the French government. He died in April 1994.

This photograph was taken in 1948 and is part of Robert Doisneau’s long-term project to record French suburban life. Some of Doisneau’s photographs are staged rather than strictly documentary in nature. If Doisneau was unable to photograph an observed scene which interested him, he would restage the scene at a later date. It is unclear in this photograph whether Doisneau came across the group at the bar, or whether, with the use of professional models or friends, he has staged the image.

PH.262-1980