Robert Doisneau : a photographer's life /

This is the full-length version of Doisneau's life and career, which were summarized in Hamilton's Robert Doisneau Retrospective (CH, Nov'93). Though it contains much more information and more than 450 photos, it leaves the reader with a lesser view of the photographer's oeuvre. Seeing and reading more reveals Doisneau as far less original or unique. The handful of his pictures repeatedly reproduced are exceptions to the rule. The rule is that of a prolific, long, and varied career of a professional who responded to essentially any request to make illustrations for other people's writing. He was dependent on others, who often took advantage of his generous nature. Even his major work on La Banlieue de Paris was published in 1949 as a book by the writer Blaise Cendrars, with 130 illustrations by Doisneau! He did not join Magnum, the agency for photojournalists cofounded by Robert Capa, feeling he would be "overwhelmed" by "big assignments" and foreign travel. Uncritical (and occasionally contradictory in its effort to praise), the text does little analysis of the work. It provides useful historical and personality contexts for mid-20th-century European media photography. It places Doisneau in that milieu, in which his photography is more like Alfred Eisenstadt's (to which it is not compared) than that of Atget or Brassai (to which it is compared). General; undergraduate (including two-year technical) through professional. C. Chiarenza; University of Rochester

Quintessentially French, photographer Robert Doisneau (1912^-94) spoke no other language and never photographed outside France's borders. Considering himself a latter-day Atget possessed of a far finer sense of humor, he roamed the streets of Paris and its working-class suburbs, looking for the amusing or simply human moments that he loved. His most famous picture, showing a young couple kissing on the street, contains the sum of his interests in pleasure, the city, and common human emotion. Communist in his sympathies, Doisneau was never overtly political in his work; indeed, he began his career working for the industrial giant, Renault. He soon went freelance and highly prized the freedom to go his own way. He never had or wanted a specialty, yet most of his best work is social documentary concentrating on the ordinary French. He also did fashion photography and portraits and even produced children's books, using his own daughters as models. Hamilton's lengthy, copiously illustrated, authorized biography affords an impressively complete look at the life of a warm, delightful mid-century photographer. --Gretchen Garner

In this first authorized biography of the French photographer Robert Doisneau (1912-94), many of his photographs are reproduced for the first time. Doisneau didn't like to travel; he found his images mostly in his own "backyard," the banlieu that defines the nearby outskirts and suburbs of Paris, especially Montrouge, where he lived with his wife of over 60 years (she died six months before him) until his death in April 1994. His two children assisted the author with this work. Photography was Doisneau's effort toward immortality, "the refusal to entirely disappear." Waiting for just the right moment, he recorded thousands of ordinary people doing ordinary and extraordinary things in the course of their day-to-day lives. Doisneau explained his motivations: "And it's better, isn't it, to shed some light on those people who are never in the limelight?" Hamilton (Doisneau: Retrospecive, St. Martin's Pr., 1993) traces modernist influences on Doisneau, notably the illustrated magazines, like Vu, Regards, and Match, that popularized "humanist" photography, and includes a chapter on technique. This important book, with its excellent reproductions, should be added to all photography collections.‘Kathleen Collins, New York Transit Museum Archives, Brooklyn (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.