Perhaps best known as the creator of images exemplyfing our romantic notion of Paris, Robert Doisneau is, in fact, a key figure in the history of documentary photography. He photographs 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 Baudelaire and later by Benjamin as the symbolic, shifting landscapes of Modernism.
Drawing not only upon Doisneau's previously unpublished archives but also on conversations with the photographer in his final years, Peter Hamilton examines every aspect of his work, including the techniques he used. In a charming narrative, Hamilton traces Doisneau's career, emphasizing his periods of engagement with the birth of photojournalism in the 1930s, humanist social realism in the 1940s and 1950s, and with montage and art brut in the 1960s. Illustrated with hundreds of photographs in duotone, many published for the first time, this book is a rare find that both enlightens and delights.
