Robert
Doisneau is famous for capturing 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.
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