LE BAISER DE L'HÔTEL DE VILLE
Robert Doisneau was the pioneer of a resource we now use often: the planned spontaneity in Photography.
Robert Doisneau got everybody tricked for a while. His photographs screamed casualness in unpremeditated scenes. It was a way of capturing life at its realest to the public.
The beautiful thing about Doisneau’s work is that they seem entirely spontaneous scenes. In this particular photograph, someone is sitting on a terrace in Paris, the city of love, and suddenly a couple walks by, and this person picks up the camera and captures that moment, that moment that looks intimate even though they are in a busy street, surrounded by people. This aura of closeness makes the whole world around them stop and disappear.
Doisneau became the “candid photographer,” always at the right place and time to take the most memorable pictures. Everything came crumbling down when the public learned that the two lovers in the famous photograph Le Baiser de l'Hôtel de Ville (1950) were mere actors, and the scene was arranged. To everyone that didn’t know this, I know what you’re thinking: why did you go and ruin the way this photograph lived blissfully in my mind?! But let me tell you, we have to think of Doisneau as who he was: a pioneer.
Le baiser de l'Hôtel de Ville (1950). Robert Doisneau.
This photograph, which appeared for the first time in the famous magazine Life, created a new way of understanding the medium. The “candid photography” presents no traces of posing, of knowing that the camera is there, and thus, the result is very natural-looking. Nowadays, we are very used to this type of shot, but at the time, it undeniably was a revolution. The fact that it was planned doesn’t matter much because the simple gesture of capturing a casual kiss happening on the street in 1950 was avant-garde.
Le Baiser de l'Hôtel de Ville has transformed into an iconic photograph, one that has broken new ground and that has made possible many of the pictures we take and post today.
